Requesting Responsibility

Abstract

Abstract This is a book about requests for action in everyday contexts. It analyzes natural video-recorded data of everyday interaction in British English and Polish families. Requests for carrying out little jobs—passing some object or fetching items from the next room—are pervasively relevant in contexts such as preparing and consuming food and caring for and playing with children. Requests therefore provide a useful window into general qualities of human sociality as well as aspects of cultural diversity. The analyses in this book describe features of interactional context that people across cultures might be sensitive to in designing a request. In particular, the other person's locally observable commitment to a shared task emerges as a quality of context that systematically enters into the way a speaker builds a request. The second half of the book analyzes the relationship between diversity across the grammatical resources of languages and diversity in the action affordances provided by these structures. Focusing on grammatical structures that exist in Polish but not in English (impersonal deontic statements, a certain type of double imperative, and a grammaticalized distinction between perfective and imperfective verbal aspect), the analyses show that language-specific turn formats can index and project social orientations within the ongoing interaction in culture-specific ways. Through its fine-grained analysis of social actions, the book points the way toward an understanding of cultural diversity that avoids the pitfalls of cultural relativism.

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