Responsibility and Action: Invariants and Diversity in Requests for Objects in British English and Polish Interaction

Abstract

We compare the use of two formats for requesting an object in informal everyday interaction: imperatives, common in our Polish data, and second-person polar questions, common in our English data. Imperatives and polar questions are selected in the same interactional “home environments” across the languages, in which they enact two social actions: drawing on shared responsibility and enlisting assistance, respectively. Speakers across the languages differ in their choice of request format in “mixed” interactional environments that support either. The findings shed light on the orderly ways in which cultural diversity is grounded in invariants of action formation.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Research on Language and Social Interaction for the following free supplemental resource(s): subtitled video clips of the analysed object request sequences.]

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor of ROLSI and three anonymous reviewers for making very helpful suggestions in the course of bringing this work to publication. Jörg Zinken's research reported here was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, AH/H03451X/1. This article was completed while Jörg had the opportunity to work at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz, part of the university's “Cultural Foundations of Integration” Center of Excellence, established in the framework of the German Federal and State Initiative for Excellence.

Notes

¹Subtitled video clips of the analyzed object request sequences are accessible on Taylor & Francis Online. All participants have given informed consent for these fragments to be made accessible.

²This turn is in fact ambiguous between the enumerative reading we have chosen for the gloss and a reading upon which weź (“take”) has an auxiliary-like function (Zinken, 2013).

³Her response is accompanied by an “okay” (line 5). We find an “okay” (or Polish dobra) response after three object requests in imperative format. In all cases, the requestee is unsure about the object they have been asked to get and indicates this problem as part of their responsive turn. The “okay” in this position appears to register a compliance-in-principle in the face of some trouble that forestalls actual compliance.

⁴Note also the benefactive “me” in Ruth's request. As opposed to Tom's “me” in Excerpt 2, the benefactive marking here is not required by the argument structure of the verb. This indexing of the requester as sole beneficiary of the requested action also appears to be relevant to the selection of the polar question format, although it is a matter that is in principle separate from the status of the request as initiating a new project versus contributing to a shared project.

⁵On recipients' momentary proximity to an object as a factor in the situated issuing of a request, see Rauniomaa and Keisanen (2012).

⁶In Rossi's (2012, p. 452) Italian data, recipients of requests in polar question format respond with acceptance or refusal tokens in 50% of cases, a number close to what we find in our data.

⁷Address terms are less common in imperative requests in our collection (they occur in 20 out of 63, or 32%, object requests in imperative format) than they are in polar question requests (25 out of the 48 cases, or 52%). More importantly, their use in imperative requests is restricted to such situations in which there is no tight fit between sequential context and imperative format.

⁸It might also work to attract Caroline's attention (cf. Goodwin, 1980).

⁹Note that there is no acceptance token from Kazio. This case, and other similar cases in our collection, shows that acceptance does not always become necessary where the compliant action cannot happen immediately. The relevance of acceptance seems to be “multimodally” created by polar question turn format and the spatial and material configuration of the situation.

¹⁰In this context, authors often cite Schegloff's (1993) assertion that “both position and composition are ordinarily constitutive of the sense and import of an element of conduct that embodies some phenomenon or practice” (p. 121). It is worth mentioning that Schegloff formulates this observation in a footnote, in a paper that is concerned with other matters.