Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

By T. Curl, Paul Drew. 2008

620 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b94adad0c8a1ae1d83f0540ca21a4aff842efd6c

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Language and Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

The Coordination of Talk and Touch in Adults’ Directives to Children: Touch and Social Control (2015, background): “…projects; Linell, 2009; Schegloff, 2007): Specific syntactic forms can be used to index the participants’ prior understandings concerning the requested action (Wootton, 1997) as well as the contingencies and participants’ entitlement (Antaki & Kent, 2012; Curl & Drew, 2008).”
Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and Decide (2012, background): “108–111) without any contingencies (see Curl & Drew, 2008 ) Hence, as linguistic constructions, these turns could be treated as “mere” informings.”
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).”
Directives: Entitlement and contingency in action (2010, neutral): “Directives If we extrapolate from Curl and Drew’s (2008) analysis of entitlement and contingency in request sequences to directive sequences, we would expect to find strong”
Three orders in the organization of human action: On the interface between knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction and social relations (2014, background): “…empirical interaction researchers have described specific “action formats” by which people design their utterances to be recognizable, for example, as requests (Lindström 2005; Heinemann 2006; Curl & Drew 2008), offers (Curl 2006), proposals (Tykkyläinen & Laakso 2009), or complaints (Ogden 2010).”
The (In)Authenticity of Simulated Talk: Comparing Role-Played and Actual Interaction and the Implications for Communication Training (2013, neutral): “…(“Would you mind . . .”) to Extracts 18–19 (“can you please s- um:: say . . . please”; “c’n y’give . . . please”), while both requests are formulated with modal verbs (“would” and “can”), the inclusion of “mind” mitigates P1’s request, lessening her entitlement to make it (see Curl & Drew, 2008).”
Bilateral and Unilateral Requests: The Use of Imperatives and Mi X? Interrogatives in Italian (2012, methodology): “Studies adopting this approach, like Curl and Drew (2008) and Wootton (1981, 1997, 2005), have shown that patterns of use in the selection of forms cannot be accounted for solely by reference to variables such as the age or status of the recipient or by the burden placed on the requestee (cf.”
Politeness and language (2015, background): “(1996), Heinemann (2006), Curl and Drew (2008), Heritage and Raymond (2005), and Heritage (2013).”