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I S S U E N O . 52 [
June 2 0 1 1]
Melisa
Stevanovic
Participants’ Deontic Rights and Action Formation:
The Case
of Declarative Requests for Action
In the domain of conversation
analysis, there has recently been a growing interest in the
exact mechanisms of action formation;
why
is an utterance heard as conveying a certain action and not something else?
This paper aims to contribute to this line of research; it considers the
role of participants’ deontic
rights in action formation. By using declarative requests for action as an
example, I
demonstrate how participants make judgments about their deontic rights
relative to their co-participants and use these judgments as a
resource as they (1) design
their turns at talk to carry out certain actions and (2) interpret their
co-participants’ turns at talk as
certain actions. Two types of declarative statements are considered: (1)
statements about the speaker and (2) statements about future actions. In
both cases, it can be seen how the speaker’s high deontic status relative to
the recipient is the decisive condition for the recipient to recognize the
utterance as implementing a request for him to act. On the basis of these
findings, it seems that
conversation analytically informed theorizing on action formation needs
to deal with the “real world” features, such as the context of ongoing
activities, the larger institutional framework and the participants’ social
roles, in a more systematic way than has been done in the past.
To
cite this publication:
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