Deontic status

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Deontic status
Author(s):	Melisa Stevanovic (Tampere University, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0429-1672)
To cite:	Stevanovic, Melisa. (2023). Deontic status. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/KW7YG

Deontic status is an attribute of a person who is in a position of active or latent authority in a specific domain of action in relation to his or her co-participants. While the term “status” is used to describe the position that a person occupies in a social structure (Linton 1936), deontic status refers to the deontic rights that a certain person has in a certain domain, irrespective of whether they momentarily claim these rights or not. In the following case from Clifton (2019), the two participants are Adele (A), who is the head of a fundraising team at a hospice, and Ray (R), who is her subordinate, who has previously sent an email to potential donors with a link to a registration form.

(Clifton 2019: 352)

01  A:    okay alright that’s fine that looks good to me
02     -> it’s just the green makes me just go o::p
03  R:    so the green possibly change

Adele makes a positive assessment of the visual design of the registration form that currently appears on a screen (line 1), but then goes on pointing out to the green color toward which her eyes have reacted in a specific way (“just go o::p”, line 2). In response, Ray announces a possible decision not to use green and with a so-preface (line 54) frames it as an upshot of Adele’s prior assessment (see, e.g., Bolden 2006). Even though Adele has not told Ray what to do, Ray orients to Adele’s status as a person whose implicitly displayed preferences of color have practical consequences for how the registration form should be visually designed. Ray, in other words, orients to Adele’s high deontic status in this domain of action.

Deontic status may thus not always correspond with the deontic stance taken, but these two co-existing phenomena need to be conceptually separated (Stevanovic 2018). As a theoretical construct, deontic status may then be used to account for the ways in which action formation and ascription can be informed by someone’s deontic authority or deontic rights in a specific domain of action. This means that, in various types of sequences of initiating and responsive actions, participants may orient to the first speaker as having deontic authority or deontic rights in a specific domain of action, irrespective of whether they have previously claimed such an authoritative position. From this perspective, deontic status is both a resource or warrant to implement an action in the first place or to implement that action in a specific way. In addition, deontic status is the outcome of a sequence that (a) verifies or challenges a participant’s claim of deontic authority or deontic rights (i.e., deontic stance) or (b) sets a participant in a position of deontic authority or deontic rights even if they have not overtly claimed such a position (as in the extract above) or assigns them a specific set of obligations and responsibilities (see Ishino & Okada 2018; Magnusson 2020).

Deontic status encompasses predicates imputed on a person based on their category memberships (for overviews, see, e.g., Pomerantz & Mandelbaum 2005; Schegloff 2007). Such category memberships include relatively stable social identity categories (e.g., mother, student), institutional roles (e.g., doctor, teacher), the temporary roles associated with specific activities (e.g., host, goalkeeper), and the fleeting interactional positions (e.g., questioner, storytelling recipient). While category memberships are frequently associated with various rights and obligations (Hester & Eglin 1997: 5; Jayyusi 2014; Potter 1996: 114; Psathas 1999: 144–145; Roba-Cuberes 2008: 548; Stokoe 2004: 112; Watson 1978: 106, 1983: 39–42), deontic status refers to a person’s rights in a specific domain of action that is relevant for the participants’ ongoing action.

Awareness of the participants’ deontic statuses in the relevant domains of action are part of the intersubjective background of action referred to as the “common ground”, consisting of the participants’ shared knowledge about the world (Clark 1996; Tomasello 2008). But just like the common ground may be subject to limitations due to various reasons such as participants’ egocentrism (e.g., Kecskes 2010; Keysar, et al. 1998), the use of deontic status as a key resource in the recipient design of action may be risky and lead to misunderstandings and/or losses of face. This problem is due to the participants sometimes having different views about their deontic rights in relation to each other. The ambiguity of deontic status as a resource of action formation, however, allows the participants also to negotiate the deontic facet of their momentary relationship (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2014).

Additional Related Entries:

• Deontic rights
• Deontic stance
• Deontic authority
• Deontics
• Epistemics
• Epistemic status

Cited References:

Bolden, G. B. (2006). Little words that matter: Discourse markers “so” and “oh” and the doing of other-attentiveness in social interaction. Journal of Communication, 56(4), 661–688.

Clifton, J. (2019). Using conversation analysis for organisational research: A case study of leadership-in-action. Communication Research and Practice, 5(4), 342–357.

Ekberg, K., & LeCouteur, A. (2015). Clients’ resistance to therapists’ proposals: Managing epistemic and deontic status. Journal of Pragmatics, 90, 12–25.

Henderson, G. (2020). Deontics at bedtime: A case study of participants’ resources in a directive trajectory involving a mother and her autistic child. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 4(2), 168–191.

Hester, S., & Eglin, P. (1997). Membership categorization analysis: An introduction. In S. Hester & P. Eglin (Eds.), Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis (pp. 1–23). University Press of America.

Ishino, M., & Okada, Y. (2018). Constructing students’ deontic status by use of alternative recognitionals for student reference. Classroom Discourse, 9(2), 95–111.

Jayyusi, L. (2014). Categorization and the Moral Order. Routledge.

Kecskes, I. (2010) The paradox of communication: a socio-cognitive approach. Pragmatics and Society, 1(1), 50–73.

Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., & Horton, W. S. (1998). The egocentric basis of language use: Insights from a processing approach. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7(2), 46–49.

Linton, R. (1936). The Study of Man. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Magnusson, S. (2020). Constructing young citizens’ deontic authority in participatory democracy meetings. Discourse & Communication, 14(6), 600–618.

Pomerantz, A. & Mandelbaum, J. (2005). Conversation analytic approaches to the relevance and uses of relationship categories in interaction. In K. L. Fitch & R. F. Sanders (eds.), Handbook of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 149–171). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Potter, J. (1996). Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social construction. Sage.

Psathas, G. (1999). Studying the organization in action: Membership categorization and interaction analysis. Human Studies, 22(2), 139–162.

Roca-Cuberes, C. (2008). Membership categorization and professional insanity ascription. Discourse Studies, 10(4), 543–570.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(3), 462–482.

Stevanovic, M. (2018). Social deontics: A nano-level approach to human power play. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 48(3), 369–389.

Stevanovic, M., & Peräkylä, A. (2014). Three orders in the organization of human action: On the interface between knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction and social relations. Language in Society, 43(2), 185–207.

Stokoe, E. H. (2004). Gender and discourse, gender, and categorization: Current developments in language and gender research. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 1(2), 107–129.

Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press.

Watson, D. R. (1978). Categorisation, authorisation and blame-negotiation in conversation. Sociology, 12(1), 105–113.

Watson, D. R. (1983). The presentation of a victim and motive in discourse: The case of police interrogations and interviews. Victimology, 8(1-2), 31-52.

Additional References: