Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting
Open accessAbstract
In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request.
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The design of the construction works up the entitlement of the offender as an appeal for parity in terms of the proposed exchange with the victim.
“The design of the construction works up the entitlement of the offender as an appeal for parity in terms of the proposed exchange with the victim (Curl & Drew, 2008).”
From A discursive analysis of compliance, resistance and escalation to threats in sexually exploitative interactions between offenders and male children (2021) · cites this paper as Curl & Drew, 2008
The victim also uses the modal format 'will you' to request a picture or video which displays an entitlement to a preferred response.
“The victim also uses the modal format 'will you' to request a picture or video which displays an entitlement to a preferred response (Curl & Drew, 2008).”
From A discursive analysis of compliance, resistance and escalation to threats in sexually exploitative interactions between offenders and male children (2021) · cites this paper as Curl & Drew, 2008
The request for a photograph initiated above is delivered with the modal verb 'I wanna', which orients to an entitlement for the request to be fulfilled.
“The request for a photograph initiated above is delivered with the modal verb 'I wanna', which orients to an entitlement for the request to be fulfilled (Curl & Drew, 2008).”
From A discursive analysis of compliance, resistance and escalation to threats in sexually exploitative interactions between offenders and male children (2021) · cites this paper as Curl & Drew, 2008
Cites
Grice, H. P. (1975) · Speech Acts · doi:10.1163/9789004368811_003 · Cited by 23,221 · see citing works
Austin, J. L. (1975) · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198245537.001.0001 · Cited by 21,496 · see citing works
The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977) · Language · doi:10.2307/413107 · Cited by 5,150 · see citing works
(1979) · Expression and Meaning · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511609213.004 · Cited by 1,393 · see citing works
Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different?
Blum-Kulka, S. (1987) · Journal of Pragmatics · doi:10.1016/0378-2166(87)90192-5 · Cited by 891 · cited 2× · see citing works
“…is generally not considered in studies that either use “real” examples of spoken utterances but abstracted from the surrounding talk/interaction (Blum-Kulka, 1987), or they use fabricated examples (e.g., Clark, 1979, Francik & Clark, 1985); Brown and Levinson analyzed both abstracted and…”
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Enfield, N. J., & Sidnell, J. (2017) · doi:10.1017/9781139025928 · Cited by 90 · see citing works
Seymour‐Smith, S., & Kloess, J. A. (2021) · British Journal of Social Psychology · doi:10.1111/bjso.12437 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
“The study employed discursive psychology (Edwards&Potter, 1992; Hepburn&Wiggins, 2007; Wiggins, 2017) to analyse the data. Discursive psychology takes into account that discourse is situated in a particular interactional context, within which it is produced (here, online chat): (1) within a rhetorical framework as par…”
Method
- Authors
- Curl, T. S., & Drew, P.
- Affiliations
- University of York (GB)
- ORCID
- Drew, Paul
- Venue
- Research on Language and Social Interaction
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2008-05-09
- Volume
- 41
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 129-153
- ISSN
- 0835-1813 (ISSN-L)
- 1532-7973
- OpenAlex
- W2033334263
- Cited by
- 802
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 26 · 2025: 41 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 44 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 80 · 2020: 65 · 2019: 38 · 2018: 42 · 2017: 55 · 2016: 102 · 2015: 52 · 2014: 66 · 2013: 38 · 2012: 26
- FWCI
- 146.06
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- dspace.lboro.ac.uk
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- Locations
- Research on Language and Social Interaction (publishedVersion)
- Loughborough University Institutional Repository (Loughborough University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Loughborough University Research Repository (Loughborough University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Linguistics and Language Analysis
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
- Keywords
- requests, modal verbs, contingency, request forms, telephone calls, physician-patient communication, service organizations, speaker orientation, syntactic variation, pragmatics
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