Giving Reasons for Doing Something Now or at Some Other Time

Abstract

Physiotherapists often have to ask their clients to move in a certain way, and they sometimes accompany such instructions with explanations. It turns out that these practitioners have an interesting resource—they can design their explanation to bear either upon the exact movement currently in play or on a more general or future case. I show that they make this distinction largely by how they deploy explanatory connectives like because, so, and so on—and, counterintuitively, how they omit such connectives. I finish by considering other datasets and discussing the pedagogical benefits, in any interaction, of being able to construct and convey different temporal domains that the account is meant to bear on.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tanya Stivers and the staff of the Max Planck Institute for their important and careful support of my work on this study. Merran Toerien, Paul Drew, and three anonymous reviewers provided generous and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I acknowledge the support of the British Council/Beta Techniek Partnership in Science via a Research Visit Grant and also the support of the Department of Health National Coordinating Centre for Research Capacity Development via a Nursing and Allied Health Postdoctoral Fellowship. Finally, I appreciate the generosity of the patients and physiotherapists who permitted their activities to be recorded and examined.

Notes

¹While the systematics of when connectives are and are not used has been little investigated, explanatory connectives themselves have been extensively studied. Of particular note are Couper-Kuhlen's (2011) analysis of turn-initial because in everyday English; Raevarra's work (2011), which includes examination of explanatory particles in Finnish; and a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics on causal connectives in several languages (T. Sanders & Stukker, 2012).

²Data were collected with informed consent of all those who were recorded. Data collection was conducted in UK NHS hospitals under approval by the UK Department of Health's North West Multi Centre Research Ethics Committee (Unique study reference: 03/8/059).

³“Can you X?” questions do occur in examination phases of treatment sessions, and the fact that they can be treated as asking about capacity rather than requesting an action is occasionally a source of misunderstandings between patients and therapists.

⁴Following Stivers (2005b) I use the circumflex or caret symbol to indicate a rise in pitch, particularly when within a word.

⁵One of two ambiguous cases included the word to, which may or may not have constituted an explanatory connective in the particular context. The sequence was also highly complicated, with the therapist simultaneously moving equipment around the treatment area and producing directive and account. These matters meant the case resisted categorization as including or not including a connective. In the other case, a vocalization (c in a slot where the term cause could have been used) meant this case could not be categorized definitively as including or not including an explanatory connective.

⁶This patient frequently repeats the therapist's talk sotto voce like this. This is likely to be a linguistic feature of her first language---a South Asian language (Sicoli, personal communication, October 2009).

⁷In Couper-Kuhlen's Extract 10 (2006, p. 106), when an account for a local action attends to both the local action context and a habitual matter, no connective is used.

⁸My initial observations on this suggest that on occasion, speakers produce account-containing sequences without connectives in such a way as to treat recipients as needing to have their attention brought to some matter, while also treating them as someone who is and should be able to make the explanatory connection themselves.