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When excuse me means excuse you!

On sanctioning others by ‘excusing’ oneself and relationships between form-based practices of speaking

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This article examines the use of excuse me as a practice for invoking the complainability of another person’s conduct in the service of sanctioning it as misconduct. It explores how a form that semantically expresses its speaker’s desire to be excused (excuse me ) can be used to flag another person’s doings as transgressive or untoward. It is proposed that, to elucidate this puzzle, it is necessary to adopt a more holistic perspective and to incorporate other uses of the format (e.g., in other-initiated repair, as an attention-drawing device), as well as possible relationships between them, into the analysis. The paper offers a sketch of such a more holistic, integrative account. This account revolves around the idea that practices of speaking that mobilize similar or even the same linguistic resources implicate partially overlapping sets of affordances for action which link different usages together in a larger pragmatic landscape. As such, form-based practices of speaking and the various actions they can implement exhibit demonstrable relationships across different domains of use which may need to be taken into account when thinking about a practice’s fit to the action it implements. One of the key benefits of such an approach is that it allows for mapping out larger pragmatic landscapes and to move beyond the isolated description of individual practices of speaking.
Keywords: complaining, complainability, misconduct, practices of speaking, affordances, pragmatic landscape
Article outline
  • 1.A practice…and a puzzle
  • 2.Data and procedure
  • 3. Excuse me as a device for invoking the complainability of another’s conduct
  • 4. Excuse me in other actions
    • 4.1Other-initiations of repair
    • 4.2Mobilizing attention: Summoning and alerting
  • 5. Excuse me as excuse you! — A return to the puzzle
  • 6.Summary and discussion
  • Notes
  • References
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