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Requesting in Social Interaction
Edited by Paul Drew and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 26] 2014
► pp. 35–54

Human agency and the infrastructure for requests

| The University of Sydney & Max Planck Institute Nijmegen

This chapter discusses some of the elements of human sociality that serve as the social and cognitive infrastructure or preconditions for the use of requests and other kinds of recruitments in interaction. The notion of an agent with goals is a canonical starting point, though importantly agency tends not to be wholly located in individuals, but rather is socially distributed. This is well illustrated in the case of requests, in which the person or group that has a certain goal is not necessarily the one who carries out the behavior towards that goal. The chapter focuses on the role of semiotic (mostly linguistic) resources in negotiating the distribution of agency with request-like actions, with examples from video-recorded interaction in Lao, a language spoken in Laos and nearby countries. The examples illustrate five hallmarks of requesting in human interaction, which show some ways in which our ‘manipulation’ of other people is quite unlike our manipulation of tools: (1) that even though B is being manipulated, B wants to help, (2) that while A is manipulating B now, A may be manipulated in return later; (3) that the goal of the behavior may be shared between A and B, (4) that B may not comply, or may comply differently than requested, due to actual or potential contingencies, and (5) that A and B are accountable to one another; reasons may be asked for, and/or given, for the request. These hallmarks of requesting are grounded in a prosocial framework of human agency.

Published online: 17 December 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.26.02enf
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Cited by 7 other publications

Ruytenbeek, Nicolas
2023. Directives (with a special emphasis on requests). In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
Duranti, Alessandro & Nicco A. La Mattina
2022. The Semiotics of Cooperation. Annual Review of Anthropology 51:1 ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Hansen, Jessica Pedersen Belisle
2022. Recruiting repair: Making sense of interpreters’ embodied actions in a video-mediated environment. Discourse Studies 24:6 ► pp. 719 ff. DOI logo
Råman, Joonas
2022. Multimodal Negotiation for the Right to Access Digital Devices Among Elderly Users and Teachers. In Shaping the North Through Multimodal and Intermedial Interaction [Arctic Encounters, ], ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
Laakso, Minna
2021. Learning to request in interaction. In Intersubjectivity in Action [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 326], ► pp. 349 ff. DOI logo
Heritage, John
2016. The Recruitment Matrix. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49:1 ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
Kendrick, Kobin H. & Paul Drew
2016. Recruitment: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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