OKAY projecting embodied compliance to directives

This chapter on Estonian and Polish OKAY focuses on complying responses to high entitlement directives. The responses are built of two parts, the verbal OKAY that completes the adjacency pair and an embodied compliance that ensues. The OKAY provides an immediate verbal notification and acceptance of the suggested action trajectory, which is relevant for the co-participants’ continuing coordination of activities in progress, while the projected embodied compliance is necessarily deferred. By looking at two genetically and historically unrelated languages and showing a similar response pattern in them, we hope to illustrate the general interactional potential of the particle OKAY, and perhaps begin to understand some of its cross-linguistic allure.

Published online: 17 March 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.34.11kee