Cover not available
Part of
Imperative Turns at Talk: The design of directives in action
Edited by Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 30] 2017
► pp. 27–63

Chapter 2
A cline of visible commitment in the situated design of imperative turns

Evidence from German and Polish

| Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim
| Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim
In the management of cooperation, the fit of a requested action with what the addressee is presently doing is a pervasively relevant consideration. We present evidence that imperative turns are adapted to, and reflexively create, contexts in which the other person is committed to the course of action advanced by the imperative. This evidence comes from systematic variation in the design of imperative turns, relative to the fittedness of the imperatively mandated action to the addressee’s ongoing trajectory of actions, what we call the “cline of commitment”. We present four points on this cline: Responsive imperatives perform an operation on the deontic dimension of what the addressee has announced or already begun to do (in particular its permissibility); local-project-imperatives formulate a new action advancing a course of action in which the addressee is already actively engaged; global-project-imperatives target a next task for which the addressee is available on the grounds of their participation in the overall event, and in the absence of any competing work; and competitive imperatives draw on a presently otherwise engaged addressee on the grounds of their social commitment to the relevant course of actions. These four turn shapes are increasingly complex, reflecting the interactional work required to bridge the increasing distance between what the addressee is currently doing, and what the imperative mandates. We present data from German and Polish informal and institutional settings.
Keywords: action formation, commitment, embodiment, imperative, imperfective, modal particles, participation, requesting
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
  • 3.The grammar of imperatives in German and Polish
  • 4.The cline of visible commitment
    • 4.1Initiating co-participants and responsive imperatives
    • 4.2Engaged recipients and local project imperatives
    • 4.3Available recipients and global project imperatives
    • 4.4Divergent engagements and competitive imperatives
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.30.02zin
References (48)
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2010. Imperatives and Commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
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 44: 876–889. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing Noun-phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bangerter, Adrian, and Herbert H. Clark. 2003. “Navigating Joint Projects with Dialogue.” Cognitive Science 27 (2): 195–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals of Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bublitz, Wolfram. 2003. "Nur ganz kurz mal": Abschwächungsintensivierung durch feste Muster mit mal ["Just very briefly mal": Intensification through weakening in fixed expressions with ‘mal’].” In Partikeln und Höflichkeit, ed. by Gisela Held, 179–201. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Chrakovskij, Viktor S. 2001. Typology of Imperative Constructions. LINCOM studies in theoretical linguistics 09. Muenchen: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clayman, Steven E., and John Heritage. 2014. “Benefactors and Beneficiaries: Benefective Status and Stance in the Management of Offers and Requests.” In Requesting in Social Interaction, ed. by Drew, and Couper-Kuhlen, 55–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 2014. “What Does Grammar Tell Us about Action?” Pragmatics 24 (3): 623–647. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Craven, Alexandra, and Jonathan Potter. 2010. “Directives: Entitlement and Contingency in Action.” Discourse Studies 12 (4): 419–442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Donhauser, Karin. 1986. Der Imperativ im Deutschen: Studien zur Syntax und Semantik des deutschen Modussystems [The imperative in German: Studies on the syntax and semantics of the German mood system]. Hamburg: Buske.Google Scholar
Duden. 2005. Die Grammatik [The Grammar]. 7th edition. Mannheim: Duden.Google Scholar
Enfield, Nick J. 2013. Relationship Thinking: Enchrony, Agency, and Human Sociality. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enfield, Nick J., Sotaro Kita, and J. P. de Ruiter. 2007. “Primary and Secondary Pragmatic Functions of Pointing Gestures.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1722–1741. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Floyd, Simeon, Giovanni Rossi, and Nick J. Enfield (eds). Under review. Getting Others to Do Things: A Pragmatic Typology of Recruitments. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Friedrich, Paul. 1972. “Social Context and Semantic Feature: The Russian Pronominal Usage.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics. The Ethnography of Communication, ed. by John J. Gumperz, and Dell Hymes, 277–300. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.Google Scholar
Fries, Norbert. 1996. Flexionsmorphologie und Syntax des Imperativs im Deutschen und im Neugriechischen: Mit einer Skizze der Flexionsmorphologie des Verbs für beide Sprachen [Inflectional morphology and syntax of the imperative in German and Modern Greek: with a sketch of inflectional verb morphology in the two languages]. Lund: Lund University.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles. 2003. “Pointing as a Situated Practice.” In Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet, ed. by Sotaro Kita, 217–241. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hentschel, Elke. 1991. “Aspect vs. Particle: Contrasting German and Serbo-Croatian.” Multilingua 10 (1–2): 139–149.Google Scholar
Heritage, John. 2012. “The Epistemic Engine: Sequence Organization and Territories of Knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 30–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John, and Geoffrey Raymond. 2005. “The Terms of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic Authority and Subordination in Assessment Sequences.” Social Psychology Quarterly 68 (1): 15–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J., and Sandra A. Thompson. 2008. “Projectability and Clause Combining in Interaction.” In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions, ed. by Ritva Laury, 99–124. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kendrick, Kobin, and Paul Drew. 2016. “Recruitments: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (1): 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, Volkmar. 1989. “Pragmatic Functions of Aspects and their Cognitive Motivation.” In Proceedings of the Second Scandinavian Symposium on Aspectology, ed. by L. G. Larsson, 1–11. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics: Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Michael, John, Natalie Sebanz, and Günther Knoblich. 2016. “The Sense of Commitment: A Minimal Approach.” Frontiers in Psychology 6: 111. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mondada, Lorenza. 2013. “Coordinating Mobile Action in Real Time: The Timely Organization of Directives in Video Games.” In Interaction and Mobility: Language and the Body in Motion, ed. by Pentti Haddington, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile, 300–341. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014a. “Conventions for Multimodal Transcription.” ([URL])
. 2014b. “Requesting Immediate Action in the Surgical Operating Room.” In Language and Social Interaction, ed. by Paul Drew, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 269–302. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Rossi, Giovanni. 2012. “Bilateral and Unilateral Requests: The Use of Imperatives and Mi X? Interrogatives in Italian.” Discourse Processes 49: 426–458. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. “When Do People Not Use Language to Make Requests?” In Language and Social Interaction, ed. by Paul Drew, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 303–334. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwitalla, Johannes. 2006. “Kommunikative Funktionen von ‘tun’ als Hilfsverb [Communicative function of the auxiliary verb ‘tun’].” In Konstruktionen in der Interaktion, ed. by Susanne Günthner, and Wolfgang Imo, 127–152. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spaeth, Andreas. 2009. “Imperativsatz [Imperative clauses].” In Slavic languages. An international Handbook of Their History, Their Structure and Their Investigation. Vol 1, ed. by Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, Karl Gutschmidt, and Sebastian Kempgen, 509–519. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Stevanovic, Melisa, and Anssi Peräkylä. 2012. “Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and Decide.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (3): 297–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stivers, Tanya. 2004. “"No No No" and Other Types of Multiple Sayings in Social Interaction.” Human Communication Research 30 (2): 260–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stukenbrock, Anja. 2015. Deixis in der Face-to-Face-Interaktion [Deixis in face-to-face interaction]. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A., Barbara A. Fox, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen. 2015. Grammar in Everyday talk: Building Responsive Actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C., and Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan, Nina Dobrushina, and Valentin Goussev. 2013. “Imperative-Hortative Systems.” In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, ed. by Matthew S. Dryer, and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. ([URL], Accessed on 2015-03-03.)
Weydt, Harald, and Elke Hentschel. 1986. Funktion und Geschichte deutscher Partikeln: Ja, doch, halt und eben [Function and history of German particles: ja, doc, halt and eben]. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Wootton, Anthony J. 1997. Interaction and the Development of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zifonun, Gisela, Ludger Hoffmann, and Bruno Strecker. 1997. Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. Vol 3 [Grammar of the German language. Vol 3]. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Zinken, Jörg. 2016. Requesting Responsibility: The Morality of Grammar in Polish and English Family Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. “Reanimating Responsibility. The weź-V2 (take-V2) Double Imperative in Polish.” In Approaches to Slavic Interaction, ed. by Nadine Thielemann, and Peter Kosta, 35–61. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zinken, Jörg, and Eva Ogiermann. 2013. “Responsibility and Action: Object Requests in English and Polish Everyday Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 46 (3): 256–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (22)

Cited by 22 other publications

Proske, Nadine
2024. Kodieren und Auswerten von Kategorien in der Interaktionalen Linguistik. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 54:2 ► pp. 173 ff. DOI logo
Virtanen, Mikko T & Riikka Nissi
2024. Negotiating joint commitment in collaborative work project: Focus on text-based requests and news deliveries in atypical work. Discourse Studies 26:3 ► pp. 402 ff. DOI logo
Clayman, Steven E & Heidi Kevoe-Feldman
2023. Dispatching First Responders: Language Practices and the Dispatcher’s Operational Role in Radio Encounters With Police Officers. Discourse & Society 34:5 ► pp. 547 ff. DOI logo
Gaskins, Dorota & Maria Frick
2023. Embodiment in directive sequences: The case of triadic interactions in a Polish-English bilingual family. International Journal of Bilingualism 27:1 ► pp. 122 ff. DOI logo
Oloff, Florence
2023. « Maintenant tout a disparu » : les requêtes indirectes déclaratives dans la formation numérique pour adultes. Langage et société N° 179:2 ► pp. 83 ff. DOI logo
Hoey, Elliott M.
2022. Self-authorizing action: Onlet me Xin English social interaction. Language in Society 51:1 ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
Raymond, Chase Wesley
2022. Suffixation and sequentiality. Interactional Linguistics 2:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Deppermann, Arnulf & Alexandra Gubina
2021. When the Body Belies the Words: Embodied Agency With darf/kann ich? (“May/Can I?”) in German. Frontiers in Communication 6 DOI logo
Simone, Monica & Renata Galatolo
2021. Timing and Prosody of Lexical Repetition: How Repeated Instructions Assist Visually Impaired Athletes’ Navigation in Sport Climbing. Research on Language and Social Interaction 54:4 ► pp. 397 ff. DOI logo
Simone, Monica & Renata Galatolo
2023. Du « faire agir autrui » au « faire ensemble » : les instructions comme moyen de soutien du mouvement corporel lors d’entraînements d’escalade avec des athlètes malvoyant.es. Langage et société N° 179:2 ► pp. 141 ff. DOI logo
Thompson, Sandra A., Barbara A. Fox & Chase Wesley Raymond
2021. The grammar of proposals for joint activities. Interactional Linguistics 1:1 ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
Betz, Emma, Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm & Peter Golato
2020. Chapter 1. Mobilizing others. In Mobilizing Others [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 33], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Golato, Peter
2020. Chapter 4. Recruitments in French. In Mobilizing Others [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 33], ► pp. 83 ff. DOI logo
Keevallik, Leelo
2020. Chapter 6. Linguistic structures emerging in the synchronization of a Pilates class. In Mobilizing Others [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 33], ► pp. 147 ff. DOI logo
Kim, Stephanie Hyeri & Mary Shin Kim
2020. Chapter 2. Requesting here-and-now actions with two imperative formats in Korean interaction. In Mobilizing Others [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 33], ► pp. 19 ff. DOI logo
Taleghani-Nikazm, Carmen, Veronika Drake, Andrea Golato & Emma Betz
2020. Chapter 3. Mobilizing for the next relevant action. In Mobilizing Others [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 33], ► pp. 47 ff. DOI logo
Zinken, Jörg, Giovanni Rossi & Vasudevi Reddy
2020. Chapter 10. Doing more than expected. In Mobilizing Others [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 33], ► pp. 253 ff. DOI logo
Bodnaruk, Elena, Larisa Reznichenko, S. Cindori, O. Larouk, E.Yu. Malushko, L.N. Rebrina & N.L. Shamne
2019. Paradigmatics, semantics and pragmatics of the imperative in German. SHS Web of Conferences 69 ► pp. 00023 ff. DOI logo
Deppermann, Arnulf
2018. Instruction practices in German driving lessons: Differential uses of declaratives and imperatives. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 28:2 ► pp. 265 ff. DOI logo
Deppermann, Arnulf
2021. Social Actions. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 69 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Fundamentals of Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. OKAY across Languages [Studies in Language and Social Interaction, 34], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 september 2024. 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.