Deontics
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Deontics | |
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| Author(s): | Melisa Stevanovic (Tampere University, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0429-1672) |
| To cite: | Stevanovic, Melisa. (2023). Deontics. 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: [] |
Deontics is a topic of conversation-analytic inquiry, focusing on how participants’ rights to determine action are oriented to and drawn upon, as observable in the ways in which the participants design their actions and organize them as sequences of action. In focusing on participants’ orientations to what “ought-to-be”—what will be forbidden, obligatory, or permissible (the ancient Greek word deon, “that which is binding”), research in deontics contributes to the filling of the traditional gap between conversation analysis and the sociological theorizing of power and authority (Stevanovic 2018).
Even though deontics may be considered as an omnirelevant aspect of human social interaction (Stevanovic & Koski 2018), it has been specifically investigated in the contexts of specific activities and interactional phenomena. These include directive instruction (Henderson 2020; Mushin, et al. 2019; Stevanovic & Kuusisto 2019;), support (Antaki & Webb 2019; Ekberg & Le Couter 2015; 2020), consultation (Cole, et al. 2021; Landmark, et al. 2015; Lindström & Weatherall 2015), joint decision making (Ristimäki, et al. 2020; Stevanovic 2012; Thompson, et al. 2021; Weiste, et al. 2020), participatory democracy (Ajslev, et al. 2020; Magnusson 2020; Wåhlin-Jacobsen & Abildgaard 2020), leadership (Clifton, et al. 2018; Clifton, 2019; Van De Mieroop 2020), and agenda management (Stephenson 2020; Stevanovic, et al. 2020; Weidner 2015).
One way to conceptualize deontics is to consider it as an additional layer of social-interactional meaning above epistemics (Heritage 2012; Heritage 2013a; 2013b; Heritage & Raymond 2005; Raymond & Heritage 2006). An exchange of information and the associated orientations to knowledgeability may sometimes only prepare the ground for making decisions on future actions (see, e.g., Stevanovic 2012). It is at this point that deontics—that is, the participants’ orientations to their respective rights to determine action—become critical.
Another way to conceptualize deontics is to consider it as representing one of the two opposite “directions of fit” between the “words” and the “world” described by Searle (1976). From this perspective, epistemics may be associated with getting the “words to match the world” and deontics with getting the “world to match the words” (Stevanovic 2011). Deontics would thus be inherently at issue in “directive-commissive” actions (Couper-Kuhlen 2014), such as requests, proposals, and suggestions (directives), on one hand, and offers, invitations, and promises (commissives), on the other. Two points are worth noting, however. First, the two types of “directions of fit” between the “words” and the “world” co-exist practically in every utterance, albeit to a different degree. Second, participants’ orientations to the two “directions of fit” are always subjected to turn-by-turn sequential negotiation.
Viewing deontics as an omnirelevant dimension of action makes it relevant to distinguish between distal deontics and proximal deontics. Distal deontics is about participants’ rights to control and decide about future action (as is the case with directives and requests), while proximal deontics is about participants’ rights to initiate, maintain, or close local sequences of joint action in the here and now of the encounter (Stevanovic 2015). Empirically, these two types of deontics may be intertwined in complex ways (see e.g., Clifton, et al. 2018; Löfgren & Hofstetter 2021; Magnusson, 2020; Nguyen & Janssens 2019; Sikveland & Stokoe 2020; Stephenson 2020; Van De Mieroop 2020), while the participants’ capacity to selectively orient to or disregard either the distal or proximal aspects of deontics enables most intricate negotiations of leadership, expertise, power, and authority (see, e.g., Stevanovic 2021; Van De Mieroop 2020).
The study of deontics may also make use of the distinction between deontic stance and deontic status, the former referring to the publicly displayed rights to determine action and the latter to the latent capacity of a person to do so, independent of whether the person has publicly claimed it or not. Heritage (2013a) has suggested that there may still be a “preference” (pg. 570) for the speaker’s publicly displayed deontic stance to be congruent with their deontic status, which could at least in part account for the maintenance of social hierarchy. However, different types of incongruencies between deontic stance and deontic status are possible and they allow the participants to negotiate their mutual power relationship without yet overtly challenging the existing order.
The analysis of power in interaction is essentially about the relative weight of deontic statuses and deontic stances—whether a person’s deontic stance is treated as capable of overruling their deontic stance or whether the deontic stances is to be taken at its face value. While both options can be equally accommodated within the formal organization of interaction, they have radically different social implications. Instead of always needing to claim their deontic rights (deontic stance) a participant may also trust in their co-participants being aware of, and taking into account, these rights anyway (deontic status). As pointed out by Tomasello (2008), in all human social interaction, the relationship between the participants’ overt interactional conduct and the intersubjective context of the interaction is complementary: “as more can be assumed to be shared between communicator and recipient, less needs to be overtly expressed” (pg. 79). The notion that deontic status as an interactional resource is in this sense not equally available for everyone, provides a starting point for social and societal critique and novel theorizing about the interactional emergence of social power inequalities.
Note that, as an omnirelevant dimension of action, deontics operates in the same domain of phenomena as the notion of agency, conceptualized as one’s degree of flexibility and accountability in relation to some course of action (Enfield 2013). What is nonetheless specific to the notion of deontics is that in and through its associated distinctions (epistemics vs. deontics, distal vs. proximal deontics, and deontic stance vs. deontic status) it draws attention to and provides practical tools for the analysis of the intricate ways in which rights to determine courses of action may be negotiated in and through sequences of interaction.
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Cited References:
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Antaki, C., & Webb, J. (2019). When the larger objective matters more: support workers’ epistemic and deontic authority over adult service‐users. Sociology of Health & Illness, 41(8), 1549–1567.
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Clifton, J. (2019). Using conversation analysis for organisational research: A case study of leadership-in-action. Communication Research and Practice, 5(4), 342–357.
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Stephenson, M. (2020). Setting the group agenda: negotiating deontic rights through directives in a task-based, oral, L2, group assessment. Classroom Discourse, 11(4), 337–365.
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Stevanovic, M. (2015). Displays of uncertainty and proximal deontic claims: The case of proposal sequences. Journal of Pragmatics, 78, 84–97.
Stevanovic, M. (2018). Social deontics: A nano‐level approach to human power play. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 48(3), 369–389.
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Stevanovic, M. & Kuusisto, A. (2019). Teacher directives in children’s musical instrument instruction: Activity context, student cooperation, and institutional priority. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 63(7), 1022–1040.
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