Overview
This book examines requests for action in everyday contexts by analyzing natural video-recorded data of everyday interaction in British English and Polish families. Requests for carrying out little jobs-passing some object or fetching items from the next room -are pervasively relevant in contexts such as preparing and consuming food, caring for and playing with children. Requests therefore provide a useful window onto general qualities of human sociality as well as on aspects of cultural diversity. Jörg Zinken describes features of interactional context that people across cultures might be sensitive to in designing a request. In particular, the other person's locally observable commitment to a shared task emerges as a quality of context that systematically enters into the way a speaker builds a request. He then analyses the relationship between diversity across the grammatical resources of languages, and diversity in the action affordances provided by these structures. Focusing on grammatical structures that exist in Polish but not in English (impersonal deontic statements, a certain type of double imperative, and a grammaticalized distinction between perfective and imperfective verbal aspect), the analyses show that language-specific turn formats can index and project social orientations within the on-going interaction in culture-specific ways. By examining social actions at a fine level of grain, the book points a way toward an understanding of cultural diversity that avoids the pitfalls of cultural relativism.
Full Product Details
Author: Jörg Zinken (Research Fellow, Research Fellow, Institut fur Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.60cm
, Height: 1.30cm
, Length: 16.00cm
Weight: 0.528kg
ISBN: 9780190210724
ISBN 10: 0190210729
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 04 August 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
Requesting Responsibility is a very well-written book that provides highly valuable insights into the cross-linguistic and interactional aspects of the variety of social actions belonging to the category of requesting. * Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Linguist *
Author Information
Jörg Zinken is Research Fellow at Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. After completing a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), he worked as a Senior Lecturer, then Reader in Language and Communication, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth (UK) before joining the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim in 2014.
