Directives: Entitlement and contingency in action

By A. Craven, Jonathan Potter. 2010

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s (2008) analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children (three—eight-year-olds). While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded (more entitled and less contingent) directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Communication, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fb7b2c616e59c0ac6f6c0269c0939117489dc50

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Asta Cekaite
2. Alexander J. Kent
3. Giovanni Rossi
4. A. Peräkylä
5. E. Weiste

In Communication

1. Alexander J. Kent
2. Giovanni Rossi

In Language and Linguistics

1. Asta Cekaite
2. Alexander J. Kent
3. M. Goodwin
4. Charles Antaki
5. Giovanni Rossi
6. Ann-Carita Evaldsson
7. A. Peräkylä
8. Elizabeth Stokoe

Citations in the corpus

• Calibration in directive/response sequences in family interaction (2013, background): “…(Blum-Kulka, 1990; Brown and Levinson, 1978; Culpeper, 1996; Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990; Labov and Fanshel, 1977:84), as well as orientations to notions of entitlement affecting syntactic shape (Craven and Potter, 2010; Curl and Drew, 2008; M.H. Goodwin, 1990; Heinemann, 2006; Lindstrom, 2005).”
• Telling people what to do (and, sometimes, why): Contingency, entitlement and explanation in staff requests to adults with intellectual impairments (2012, background): “In studying parents’ requests to their children, Craven and Potter (2010) reaffirm the utility of the Curl and Drew dimensions, but extend them to show that parents at mealtimes preferentially use more directives than requests, claiming still more entitlement and showing even less concern for their…”
• Compliance, resistance and incipient compliance when responding to directives (2012, background): “Previous research has demonstrated two highly significant dimensions to directing: entitlement and contingency (Antaki and Kent, 2012; Craven and Potter, 2010; Curl and Drew, 2008; Heinemann, 2006).”
• Bilateral and Unilateral Requests: The Use of Imperatives and Mi X? Interrogatives in Italian (2012, background): “In a study of directives used by parents with their children, Craven and Potter (2010) discussed a contrast between “asking” and “telling” others to do things and the impact that this has on the kind of behavior that is due next.”