Directive-giving and grammatical forms
Mitigation devices in a medical laboratory setting
This paper investigates the use of grammatical forms in directive sequences by drawing on daily interactions between colleagues in a medical laboratory in Hong Kong. From a conversation analytic perspective, we focus on how directives in Cantonese are commonly formulated and how the force of a directive is mitigated. Our analysis shows that (1) the imperative seems to be the most frequently used syntactic form for giving directives and there is no apparent hierarchical (‘power’) differentiation, (2) the imperative-formulated directives are frequently mitigated by the use of a range of linguistic forms as well as interactional resources.
References
Antaki, Charles, and Alexandra Kent
2012 “
Telling People What to Do (and, sometimes, why): Contingency, Entitlement and Explanation in Staff Requests to Adults with Intellectual Impairments.”
Journal of Pragmatics 441: 876–889.


Asmuß, Birte, and Jan Svennevig
2009 “
Meeting Talk: An Introduction.”
Journal of Business Communication 46 (1): 3–22.


Bilbow, Grahame
1997 “
Spoken Discourse in the Multicultural Workplace in Hong Kong: Applying a Model of Discourse as ‘Impression Management’.” In
The Language of Business: An International Perspective, ed. by
Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and
Sandra Harris, 21–48. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Juliane House
1989 “
Cross-cultural and Situational Variation in Requestive Behavior.” In
Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, ed. by
Shoshana Blum-Kulka,
Juliane House, and
Gabriele Kasper, 123–154. New York: Oxford University Press.

Boden, Deirdre
1994 The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Byon, Andrew Sangpil
2006 “
The Role of Linguistic Indirectness and Honorifics in Achieving Linguistic Politeness in Korean.”
Journal of Politeness Research 21: 247–276.


Chen, Rong, Lin He, and Chunmei Hu
2013 “
Chinese Requests: In Comparison to American and Japanese Requests and with Reference to the “East-West Divide”.”
Journal of Pragmatics 551: 140–161.


Craven, Alexandra, and Jonathan Potter
2010 “
Directives: Entitlement and Contingency in Action.”
Discourse Studies 12 (4): 419–442.


Curl, Traci, and Paul Drew
2008 “
Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting.”
Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (2): 129–153.


Drew, Paul, and John Heritage
(eds) 1992 Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ervin-Tripp, Susan
1976 “
Is Sybil there? The Structure of some American English Directives.”
Language in Society 51: 25–66.


Fang, Xiaoyan
2003 Guangzhou Fangyan Jumo Yuqi Zhuci [
Sentence-Final Mood Particles of the Guangzhou Cantonese]. Guangzhou: Jinan University Press.

Fukushima, Saeko
2000 Requests and Culture: Politeness in British English and Japanese. Bern: Lang.

Goodwin, Marjorie Harness
2006 “
Participation, Affect, and Trajectory in Family Directive/Response Sequences.”
Text & Talk 26 (4/5): 515–543.


Harris, Sandra
2003 “
Politeness and Power: Making and Responding to ‘Requests’ in Institutional Settings.”
Text 23 (1): 27–52.


Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman
2010 Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and institutions. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.


Holmes, Janet, and Maria Stubbe
2003 Power and Politeness in the Workplace: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work. London: Longman.

Keisanen, Tinna, and Mirka Rauniomaa
2012 “
The Organisation of Participation and Contingency in Prebeginnings of Request Sequences.”
Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (4): 323–351.


Koester, Almut
2010 Workplace Discourse. London: Continuum.

Kwok, Helen
1984 Sentence Particles in Cantonese. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.

Lee, Cynthia
2011 “
Strategy and Linguistic Preference of Requests by Cantonese Learners of English: An Interlanguage and Cross-cultural Comparison.”
Multilingua 301: 99–129.


Lee-Wong, Song Mei
2000 Politeness and Face in Chinese Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson
1981 Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Matthews, Stephen, and Virginia Yip
2011 Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. (2nd edition). London/New York: Routledge.

Mondada, Lorenza
2014 “
Instructions in the Operating room: How the Surgeon Directs their Assistant’s Hands.”
Discourse Studies 16 (2): 131–161.


Pufahl Bax, Ingrid
1986 “
How to Assign Work in an Office: A Comparison of Spoken and Written Directives in American English.”
Journal of Pragmatics 101: 673–692.


Rue, Yong-Ju, and Grace Qiao Zhang
Sacks, Harvey
1992 Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.

Schegloff, E.A
2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.


Upadhyay, Shiv R
2003 “
Nepali Requestive Acts: Linguistic Indirectness and Politeness Reconsidered.”
Journal of Pragmatics 351: 1651–1677.


Vine, Bernadette
2009 “
Directives at Work: Exploring the Contextual Complexity of Workplace Directives.”
Journal of Pragmatics 411: 1395–1405.


Weigel, Margaret M., and Ronald M. Weigel
1985 “
Directive use in a Migrant Agricultural Community: A Test of Ervin-Tripp’s Hypotheses.”
Language in Society 141: 63–80.


Wierzbicka, Anna
2003 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. (2nd edition). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.


Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Chan, Angela
Du-Babcock, Bertha & Angela Chi Kuen Chan
2019.
Can Simulated Data be Comparable to Authentic Data?: A Comparative
Analysis of Meeting Chairing Activities.
Business Communication Research and Practice 2:2
► pp. 62 ff.

Lim, Ni-Eng
2019.
Introduction.
Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 10:2
► pp. 127 ff.

Ren, Wei
2018.
Mitigation in Chinese online consumer reviews.
Discourse, Context & Media 26
► pp. 5 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.