The Organization of Participation and Contingency in Prebeginnings of Request Sequences

Abstract

This article focuses on situated requests, i.e., interactional turns, the aim of which is to have the recipient do something (e.g., hand a tissue, close a door). Requests in face-to-face interaction are produced in complex social-interactional and material settings, where the organization of participation and attention to other ongoing activities are contingencies to be dealt with. We show that participants' use of space, material objects, and the positioning of bodies in the prebeginnings of request turns (i.e., immediately before the verbal production of turns) are important means used in addressing such contingencies. The data are drawn from video recordings of casual face-to-face and in-car conversations in English.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Charles Antaki and the anonymous reviewers as well as our colleague Pentti Haddington for their invaluable comments that have helped us in improving the manuscript. We would also like to thank Eric Laurier, University of Edinburgh, for allowing us access to his data in the Habitable Cars project. An early version of this study was presented at ICCA10 in Mannheim, Germany. We appreciate all the comments we received there and on various other occasions where we have presented these data and ideas. We contributed equally to the preparation of the article, and the order of our names in the list of authors is presented in alphabetical order. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland (Proj. No. 128286, Tiina Keisanen), the Emil Aaltonen Foundation (Project Talk&Drive, Mirka Rauniomaa), and the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Finland.