Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

Abstract

In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request.

Notes

This is a report of research undertaken as part of the project Affiliation and Disaffiliation in Interaction: Language and Social Cohesion, funded by the British Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC; Grant No. RES–00023–0035). Under the terms of a European Science Foundation initiative, the ESRC—whose support is gratefully acknowledged—funded the British part of a five-nation study coordinated by Anna Lindström (University of Uppsala, Sweden). The title is “Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting.”

1 We think that it is pretty widely accepted now that, as Watts (2003) noted, Can/could you do X has become the unmarked form for requesting (p. 193)—conventionally a standard way to make a request directly. So that the distinction between Would you … and Could you … is of relatively minor significance (except as a resource for wisecracks).

2 The tense of wonder may be significant in these contexts. The literature is somewhat loose on this point: Watts (2003), quoting House and Kasper (1981), referred only to past tense (I wondered if …) and progressive aspect with past tense (I was wondering … pp. 183 and 196). However, these, again, are hypothetical or made-up examples. All the cases that we have found in our data are simple present tense: I wonder if.

3 The first published reference we found to requests as dispreferred first actions is this: “In the case of requests, which may themselves not be the preferred way of acquiring some object or service, the prerequest can make possible an offer …” (Schegloff, 1990, p. 63). This claim is developed in Lerner (1996, pp. 314–316) and most recently Schegloff (2006, chapter 5). The evidence for regarding requests as dispreferred initial actions is, in our view, at least equivocal. For instance, Lerner (1996) showed that anticipating where a speaker is “going” with some preliminaries and that they want something, recipients may step in and offer what they take it the other wants; Lerner cited this example (p. 315):

J:	=	Okay, you c- I just uh thought if you uh- .hh en I'll take the book in so we c'n kind'v exchange packages
P:	=	.hhh Oh I have- I have yer book but if you don't mind I'd [like tuh keep it awhile.
J:	=	[OH please. No if you'd like to yer perfectly welcome

Lerner comments that the anticipatory completion—designed to interrupt the emerging action by P—in which J offers that P should keep the book (last line of extract) is evidence for the preference for offers and dispreference for requesting. However, this flies in the face of the fact that P continues in the overlap through to completion of her request; that is, they persist unnecessarily with their request (the other example Lerner showed as similar evidence has precisely the same feature, i.e., that the request is carried through to completion, in overlap with the other's offer). If a request were indeed a dispreferred action, then the speaker who wants something has every opportunity to halt the progress of his or her request at or close after the point at which the other begins in overlap with their offer.

4 In Britain, patients register with a primary care physician, which generally means the doctor in charge of the office closest to the patient's home. Each doctor's office has an after-hours line that patients may call with medical queries that do not seem (initially at least) to warrant a trip to the emergency room. A doctor may then either give advice for self-treatment, offer to visit the patient at home, or recommend that the patient go immediately for emergency treatment.

5 Imperatives, negative interrogatives, and I want formulations (which are treated as requests by the recipient) account for the remaining one third of the collection. These request formats are, in a sense, just what we would expect to find and represent part of the continuum (see Curl et al., 2007) of the syntactic formats of requests (see also Lindström, 2005; Heinemann, 2006). Early research into requests and indirectness has recognized these forms (save imperatives) as conventional request forms (e.g., Searle, 1975; Ervin-Tripp, 1976). Although imperatives are comparatively rare in the telephone data, some of the videotaped dinnertime interactions we are currently analyzing show that the use of imperatives is tied to the same issues of entitlement and contingency we identify here. The not-uncommon production of imperatives as requests additionally seems to contrast with the prevailing explanation that politeness informs speakers' choice of request form.

6 There are altogether 39 requests, but some are subsequent formulations of requests for assistance with the same problem. No second productions of a request are done with an I wonder preface.

7 The next largest group of linguistically explicit requests are those in which callers specify that they want advice from the doctor without using an I wonder preface, yet there are only half as many of these as of I-wonder-prefaced requests.

8 Although there may indeed be some relationship between the objective circumstances of a caller's situation and their subjective claim to need help, it is not easily discernable in the after-hours medical corpus. Some callers report what seem to be serious problems—a 83-year-old unable to keep food or drink down for more than 3 days; an asthmatic child having continued difficulty in breathing after the administration of medicine—but they themselves do not treat them as such (see also Gill, Halkowski, & Roberts, 2001, p. 57, on the delicacy of patients doing the doctor's work of diagnosis). The callers in Examples 7 through 17, however, do portray the situation as recognizably serious and doctor-able (even doctor-necessary), both through the way they describe the problem and the way they format their requests to display expectations of entitlement. This stands in contrast to the majority of request calls in the after-hours medical corpus that merely wonder if help is available.

9 Kat is suggesting that her father collect her from a town nearby to her home rather than collect her from the city where she is away at university.