Proposals for Activity Collaboration

ABSTRACT

This article examines two common ways that speakers propose a new joint activity—“Let’s X” and “How about X”—in an examination of video recordings of children playing. Whereas Let’s constructions treat the proposed activity as disjunctive with the prior, How about constructions treat the proposed activity as modifying the ongoing activity. We rely on distributional as well as turn-design evidence including phonetic and bodily resources of turn design. We also analyze deviant cases where we argue that speakers are working to either increase or decrease the distance between the new activity and the prior activity. Data are in Canadian English.

Notes

¹ Enfield used “recruitments” in conjunction with his grant proposal “Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use” funded by the ERC in 2010 (personal communication, July 27, 2010).

² Note that proposals were rare enough that they were folded into a category including offers, requests, and suggestions that combined were less than 2% but of which requests, offers, and suggestions were more frequent.

³ For readers who specifically wish to know about the grade level of the children, this is available in the headers for each data extract. JK and SK correspond to junior and senior kindergarten respectively. G1–G3 correspond to grades 1–3.

⁴ Not all utterances making use of the Let’s X or How about X frame were proposals for a joint activity. As mentioned earlier, “Let’s see” is rarely done as a proposal of this type, for instance. Some of these are done much more as self-talk. Moreover, the How about X frame for objects proposes objects but not activities as in “How about this one?” Although this is very close to our phenomenon, our focus was on proposals for joint activities that made use of one of these frames.