Advice

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Advice
Author(s):	Sandra A. Thompson (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7794-2042) & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (University of Helsinki, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2030-6018)
To cite:	Thompson, Sandra A. & Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. (2023). Advice. 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: []

Giving advice, according to one commonly accepted understanding, is an action type advocating a future action or activity to be carried out by the recipient that will be of primary benefit to the recipient (Clayman & Heritage 2014; Couper-Kuhlen 2014).

Advice-giving actions are a type of suggestion (Couper-Kuhlen 2014), which themselves belong to the family of directive actions (Searle 1976). Advice-giving actions may be solicited (Thompson & Couper-Kuhlen 2020) or volunteered. In the latter case, they are typically produced in the context of troubles talk (Jefferson & Lee 1981), complaining by a participant (Kendrick & Drew 2016), or embodied displays of trouble. In such situations the advice is offered as a possible solution to what is treated as that participant’s problem. For example, in extract (1), in response to Emma’s complaints about a toenail problem, Lottie advises her to come down to where Lottie is on Saturdays to get shots.

(1) [NB 14:10] (Couper-Kuhlen & Thompson 2022: 194)

01  LOT:    .t.hh We:ll you c'd go dow:n evry SA-er [THEY'RE O-uh he's=
02  EMM:                                            [Yah.
03  LOT:    =dow:n there Sa:turda[y, .hh]h
04  EMM:                         [Ye:ah.]

As with directives in general, morality is involved in advice-giving. Participants giving or receiving advice are sharply attuned to each other’s deontic rights (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012, Stevanovic & Svennevig 2015), i.e., “how strong a participant’s rights are to decide what the world will be like in the future and/or how strong a participant’s commitment is to bring about a particular future state of affairs” (Couper-Kuhlen 2014: 624). The specific format chosen for offering the advice can typically be correlated with deontic strength (Couper-Kuhlen & Thompson 2022). Thus, advice conveyed with an imperative format such as:

(2) [Drunk driving: 2]

MEG: go to a school that has library sciences.

essentially tells the recipient what to do, and is treated by participants as more deontically forceful than advice offered with a weaker format such as the I’d X format, which informs the recipient what the advice-giver would do in a similar situation, inviting the recipient to infer that they should do the same:

(3) [NB 24:11]

LOT: I'd just go ahead and have the par↓t*y.

In many contexts, especially where social roles are unequal, either institutionally or in the moment, participants also generally behave in ways that are sensitive to the delicacy of advice-giving. Heritage & Sefi (1992: 362), for example, report on health workers’ visits to first-time mothers, showing how both the health visitors and the new mothers orient to “their visits [as having] an unavoidable dimension of surveillance and social control”. Similarly, in academic peer-tutoring sessions, Waring (2005: 346) argues that “… resistance relates to issues of identity claims and knowledge asymmetry”, and Shaw & Hepburn (2013: 353) show how mothers advising their grown daughters may go “beyond forwarding a future course of action, to being packaged with some judgment whereby the recipient is cast as failing in some way.”

Recipients responding to advice-giving are normatively expected to indicate an intention to take up the advice in the future, as in (4), or to provide an account for not intending to do so, as in (5).

(4) [NB 14:12] (Couper-Kuhlen & Thompson 2022: 189)

19  LOT: -> I::'d uh leave o:ff the mea:t.
20  EMM: => °I think I wi:ll.° I haven't had a piece of mea:t since I
21       => been down here.

(5) [Geri & Shirley: 3] (Thompson & Couper-Kuhlen 2020: 122)

11 GER: -> .hhhh Shi:rley, I mean ↑why don't you try taking it a↑gai[:n.
12 SHI:                                                             [.hhh-
13 SHI: => .hhhhh ‘cause I really don't know if I could put myself through it
14      => all over again.

Participants given advice by someone who positions themselves as having greater deontic authority often reject or push back against such advice since it offers a unilateral resolution to the problem, thereby depriving them of the agency to fully participate in resolving their own problems (see also Holmes, et al. 2017):

(6) [NB 28:5] (Couper-Kuhlen & Thompson 2022: 191)

09 LOT:    [will you stay di- oh well you[pro↓bably<]
10 EMM:                                  [I'M GONNA ]STAY .hh
11         YOU KNOW I ONLY HA:VE one brassiere and pair of panties Lottie,h
12 LOT: -> well wash them ou:[:t.
13 EMM: =>                   [that's what I(h)'M DOING RI:GHT NOW

Additional Related Entries:

• Deontics
• Directive
• Epistemics
• Proposal
• Social action
• Social action format
• Suggestion

Cited References:

Clayman, S. & Heritage, J. (2014). Benefactors and beneficiaries: Benefactive status and stance in the management of offers and requests. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & P. Drew, (Eds.), Requesting in Social Interaction (pp. 55-86). John Benjamins.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). What does grammar tell us about action?. Pragmatics, 24(3), 623-647.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Thompson, S. A. (2022). Action ascription in everyday advice-giving sequences. In A. Deppermann & M. Haugh (Eds.), Action Ascription: Interaction in Context (pp. 183-207). Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, J. & Sefi, S. (1992). Dilemmas of advice: Aspects of the delivery and reception of advice in interactions between health visitors and first time mothers. In P. Drew & J. Heritage (Eds.), Talk at Work (pp. 359–419). Cambridge University Press.

Holmes, E. J. B., Toerien, M., & Jackson, C. (2017). The interactional bind of “Just [Do X]”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(4), 419-434.

Jefferson, G. & J. R. E. Lee. 1981. The rejection of advice: Managing the problematic convergence of a “troubles-telling” and a “service encounter.” Journal of Pragmatics, 5, 399–421.

Kendrick, K. H. & Drew, P. (2016). Recruitment: Offers, requests, and the organization of assistance in interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 49(1), 1-19.

Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5, 1-23.

Shaw, C. & Hepburn, A. (2013). Managing the moral implications of advice in informal interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 46(4), 344-362.

Stevanovic, M. & Peräkylä, A. (2012). Deontic authority in interaction: The right to announce, propose, and decide. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 45(3), 297-321.

Stevanovic, M. & Svennevig, J. (2015). Introduction: epistemics and deontics in conversational directives. Journal of Pragmatics, 78, 1-6.

Thompson, S. A. & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2020). English ‘why don’t you X’ as a formulaic expression. In R. Laury & T. Ono. (Eds.), Fixed Expressions: Building Language Structure and Social Action (pp. 99-131). John Benjamins.

Waring, H. Z. (2005). Peer tutoring in a graduate writing center: Identity, expertise, and advice resisting. Applied Linguistics, 26(2). 141-168.

Additional References: