Are They Requests? An Exploration of Declaratives of Trouble in Service Encounters

ABSTRACT

Despite extensive literature on what may be involved in making a request, there is dispute among scholars as to which linguistic formats constitute the social action of making a request proper. In this study, we examine the much-disputed declarative request format and in particular what we call “declaratives of trouble.” We present evidence that in the context of a service encounter such as the shoe repair shop, this format is unproblematically and systematically treated by both customer and service provider as performing requests. The study thus enriches our understanding of action formation and ascription by examining in detail that and how utterances that in some contexts might not serve as requests in other contexts constitute a primary resource for building requests. Data are in American English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Details of informed consent are given in the Data and Methods section of this article

² In fact, these criteria could be used for excluding, e.g., interrogatives from being categorized as requests proper. As noted by Levinson (2013), questions are in fact “such a common vehicle for other actions that some authors treat interrogative features as merely one of a number of turn design features (like gaze, prosody, epistemic asymmetry) calculated to elicit response (Stivers & Rossano, 2010), thus stripping such questions of their primary action force, and reducing them to mere packaging in the service of other actions” (pp. 119). Formats such as can/will you x, for instance, may quite clearly “ask” the recipient to perform a specific activity, but they also—literally—“ask” for information or confirmation regarding the recipient’s ability or willingness to perform that activity. See, e.g., Heinemann (2006, example 4). As we are not here concerned with determining whether other formats that are used for requesting should be considered requests proper, we merely note this as an observation.

³ We do not have the space for providing a systematic prosodic analysis of the different okay tokens that are used in the shoe repair shop, but note that the second okay of Excerpt 3 is qualitatively different from the first okay and is accompanied by the shoetender reaching for and grabbing the shoe, thus displaying his interpretation of the declarative of trouble as a request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a small grant from the home department of the first author.