The Alignment of Manual and Verbal Displays in Requests for the Repair of an Object

Abstract

In this study we explore request sequences at an American shoe repair shop. We investigate the methods through which customers at the shop present objects for repair or alteration, focusing on the fine interplay between their verbal requests and their manual manipulation of these objects. Our analysis shows that customers coming to the shoe repair shop enact an epistemic stance toward the object they have brought in for repair. We argue that the verbal utterances and manual manipulations are fitted to one another with regard to the epistemic stance individual customers display: Customers whose requests are formulated, for instance, as problem descriptions or as inquiries into the repairability of an object manipulate the object only very minimally, if at all; whereas customers whose requests are formulated as solution specifications manipulate the object in ways that also evidence the problem and/or its solution. The data are in American English.

We would very much like to thank Ceci Ford and Maurice Nevile for their valuable, insightful, and very detailed comments to and discussions of an earlier version of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Johs Wagner, Dennis Day, and Tine Larsen for helpful discussions, which have helped us clarify and shape our analytic and general arguments. We also thank Charles Antaki and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions. Special thanks to Patricia Davidson, Keegan Funderburk, and Kayla Stearns for their work in recording and transcribing the data, and to the owners of the shop for allowing us to record.

Notes

¹ The English language lacks a suitable term for the people who work at the counter of this shoe shop. We have opted to use staff, due to its relative neutrality. We are aware of the infelicity of this term in some of our uses—for example, for singular referents—and we beg the forgiveness of our readers for this awkward usage.

² All examples shown in this article are typical in this respect. In all six cases the staff directs her/his gaze to the object either while the customer is carrying it toward the counter or at the latest when it is placed on the counter. And, with the exception of Excerpt (5), the staff subsequently leans in toward the object, as if inspecting it.

³ The shoes are placed so that the problem area—the heels—is visually accessible to the staff. We cannot determine whether this is done for cause here, but see Excerpt (2) for other ways in which customers, through their physical manipulation, can indicate the problem area.

⁴ Intriguingly, this means that the doctor is invoked here as the agent for legitimizing the customer’s visit to the shoe repair shop and the “repairability” of the shoes, in a way similar to what is done by patients seeking medical help in invoking third parties to orient to doctorability (e.g., Heritage & Robinson, 2006).

⁵ Exactly what the customer is doing with the [s] at the end of wife is not clear.

⁶ The commonplace nature of the problem is also apparent from the fact that the staff has a collection of soles ready and at hand, which she pulls out around line 08 and uses to illustrate how they would normally solve the problem.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by a small grant from the Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder (first author) and by a Marie Curie fellowship from the European Research Council (second author). We thank the department and the ERC for their support.