Zinken2021

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Zinken2021
BibType ARTICLE
Key Zinken2021
Author(s) Jörg Zinken, Julia Kaiser, Matylda Weidner, Lorenza Mondada, Giovanni Rossi, Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Title Rule Talk: Instructing Proper Play With Impersonal Deontic Statements
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Accountability, Rules, Deontic, Deontic modality, instruction, Impersonal structure
Publisher
Year 2021
Language English
City
Month
Journal Frontiers in Communication
Volume 6
Number
Pages eid: 660394
URL Link
DOI 10.3389/fcomm.2021.660394
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

The present paper explores how rules are enforced and talked about in everyday life. Drawing on a corpus of board game recordings across European languages, we identify a sequential and praxeological context for rule talk. After a game rule is breached, a participant enforces proper play and then formulates a rule with an impersonal deontic statement (e.g. “It’s not allowed to do this”). Impersonal deontic statements express what may or may not be done without tying the obligation to a particular individual. Our analysis shows that such statements are used as part of multi-unit and multi-modal turns where rule talk is accomplished through both grammatical and embodied means. Impersonal deontic statements serve multiple interactional goals: they account for having changed another’s behavior in the moment and at the same time impart knowledge for the future. We refer to this complex action as an “instruction.” The results of this study advance our understanding of rules and rule-following in everyday life, and of how resources of language and the body are combined to enforce and formulate rules.

Notes