Requests for food and other things at the family dinner table generally run off smoothly, without “breaking the surface” of interaction. That is, in an environment of multiple concurrent involvements (Lerner and Raymond, 2014), requesting and fulfilling requests for food or other things usually only momentarily suspends or delays the progressivity of other concurrent activities.This conversation analytic study examines requests in which interactants do “more” than just requesting. Drawing on videotaped holiday dinners of nine families in the Northeastern United States, 91 requests (principally for food) were collected. I show how at each position in the unfolding of a request sequence, opportunities may be taken to implement some other action. That is, requests may be formulated in such a way as to do more than requesting (e.g. they may enact impatience, implement a complaint about the requested item, or treat an interlocutor as noncompliant). Responses to requests may be produced in such a way as to do more than fulfilling the request (e.g. they may enact attentiveness, critique being asked for the item, teach proper norms of conduct, or even perform a “tit for tat”). In third position also, appreciations or acknowledgements of fulfilled requests may do more than appreciating or acknowledging (e.g. they may be designed to acknowledge an impropriety in the fulfilling of the request). Findings indicate how the formulation, fulfillment and acknowledgement of requests may provide a structure through which norms of food consumption and distribution, family relationships and personhood may be enacted and negotiated.
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Ervin-Tripp, Susan M. 1981. “How to Make and Understand a Request.” In Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics, ed. by Herman Parret, Marina Sbisà, and Jef Verschueren, 195–209. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Heinemann, Trine. 2006. “‘Will You or Can't You?’ Displaying Entitlement in Interrogative Requests.”Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1081–1104.
Kendrick, Kobin. ms. “Evidential Vindication in Next Turn: Using the Retrospective ‘See?’ in Conversation.”
Lerner, Gene H., and Don H. Zimmerman. 2003. “Action and the Appearance of Action in the Conduct of Very Young Children.” In Studies in Language and Social Interaction, ed. by Phillip Glenn, Curtis D. LeBaron, and Jenny Mandelbaum, 441–457. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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Wootton, Anthony J. 1981. “The Management of Grantings and Rejections by Parents in Request Sequences.”Semiotica 37: 59–89.
Zinken, Jörg, and Eva Ogiermann. 2013. “Responsibility and Action: Invariants and Diversity in Requests for Objects in British English and Polish Interaction.”Research on Language and Social Interaction 46: 256–276.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Mandelbaum, Jenny, Darcey deSouza, Wan Wei & Kaicheng Zhan
2022. Micro-moments of social support: Self-service-occasioned offers at the family dinner table. Communication Monographs 89:3 ► pp. 281 ff.
deSouza, Darcey K.
2020. Getting someone else to play with you: entering into play in everyday family interactions. International Journal of Play 9:3 ► pp. 302 ff.
Kobayashi Hillman, Kyoko, Steven J. Ross & Gabriele Kasper
2018. Achieving epistemic alignment in a psycholinguistic experiment. Applied Linguistics Review 9:4 ► pp. 617 ff.
Kent, Alexandra & Kobin H. Kendrick
2016. Imperative Directives: Orientations to Accountability. Research on Language and Social Interaction 49:3 ► pp. 272 ff.
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