Curl2008

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Curl2008
BibType ARTICLE
Key Curl2008
Author(s) Traci S. Curl, Paul Drew
Title Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Requests
Publisher
Year 2008
Language
City
Month
Journal Research on Language and Social Interaction
Volume 41
Number 2
Pages 129–153
URL Link
DOI 10.1080/08351810802028613
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request.

Notes