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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. 381–410

Chapter 13
Adjusting the design of directives to the activity environment

Imperatives in Finnish cooking club interaction

| University of Helsinki | Institute for the Languages of Finland
This chapter examines the design of directives in Finnish conversation in the specific institutional setting of cooking club meetings held in a youth club. During these meetings, children bake pastries and a teacher supervises them, organising activities and giving the children instructions and advice. This chapter focuses on the teacher’s verbal directives. More specifically, the analysis examines imperatively formatted directives, but also compares the activity environments in which imperatives and other directive formats are used, especially second-person declaratives. This choice of these different formats is discussed as well as the specific design features of the imperatively formatted turns, exploring how they are adjusted to the progress and temporality of the ongoing actions as well as to the emerging participation framework.
Keywords: imperative, second-person declarative, Finnish, instruction, participation, timing, embodied action, adult–child interaction, Conversation Analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Imperatives – managing recipient’s actions that are already under way
    • 3.1Indicating an immediate need for the nominated action
    • 3.2Elaborating on the imperative turn: Managing the temporality of the nominated action
  • 4.Declaratives – initiating new actions
    • 4.1Modal-verb declaratives: initiating a new project
    • 4.2Giving advice with modal-verb declaratives
    • 4.3Simple declaratives: A new step in the ongoing project
  • 5.The design of teacher’s directives – managing the temporal progress of the ongoing activities and the participation framework
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.30.13rae
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