Deontic authority
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Deontic authority | |
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| Author(s): | Melisa Stevanovic (Tampere University, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0429-1672) |
| To cite: | Stevanovic, Melisa. (2023). Deontic authority. 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: [] |
Deontic authority refers to the capacity of a person to determine action. It is about defining what “ought-to-be”—what will be forbidden, obligatory, or permissible (the ancient Greek word deon, “that which is binding”; Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012). Deontic authority involves both the right of a person to expect another person’s compliance and their right to launch autonomous action with consequences for another person.
As a moral and political notion, “authority” involves an exercise of power that is regarded as legitimate by those subject to it (Lukes 1978: 649; Weber 1978; Wild 1974; Zelditch & Walker 1984). Bochenski (1974) described authority as a triadic relation consisting of “the bearer” of authority (someone, x, who is said to have authority), “the subject” of authority (someone, y, for whom the bearer is an authority), and “the field” (class of entities, ɤ, in which x has authority for y). Authority is thus not primarily about someone claiming authority, but it is about others accepting someone as an authority in a specific domain. A widespread view involves a distinction between a person being an authority either in a certain field of knowledge or occupying a position associated with rights to set rules for action (Bochenski 1974; Lukes 1978). While the notion of epistemic authority (e.g., Heritage 2013; Heritage & Raymond 2005) encompasses the former, the notion of deontic authority encompasses the latter.
Participants’ orientations to deontic authority can be observed in the ways in which their turns are designed and linked to their co-participants’ turns of talk. Essential to achieving deontic authority in interaction is the notion of recipient design (Sacks, et al. 1974) whereby the action that a turn at talk performs makes relevant “a particular identity or membership category of both the recipient and, reciprocally, the speaker” (Clifton 2018: 336). In some settings, such as medical consultation (Boyd 1998; Heritage 2005; Peräkylä 1998, 2002), classroom (Macbeth 1991), or support work (Antaki & Webb 2020), deontic authority is closely related to institutional power. On other occasions, deontic authority is derived from awareness of social obligations in a public domain (Ran & Huang 2019).
Deontic authority becomes relevant in two domains of action. First, there is the domain of spoken and expressive contributions in the interaction then and there (“proximal deontics”). Someone’s authority in this domain becomes visible, for example, when people, in various institutional interactions, comply with the asymmetrical turn-taking systems (e.g., teacher and pupils in a classroom) that endow them with quite different amounts of freedom in terms of their talk (Kendall 1993; Macbeth 1991; Mehan 1979) or, for other reasons, allow one participant of the encounter (e.g., the chairperson of an organizational meeting) to exert control over the agenda for the emerging interaction (Angouri & Marra 2011; Boden 1994; McKinlay & McVittie 2006; Pomerantz & Denvir 2007; Ruusuvuori 2000;). Second, there is the domain of actions to be performed sometime later (“distal deontics”). When participants discuss their future actions, their orientations to deontic authority can be seen, for example, in people’s overt expressions of subordination (Griswold 2007) and their displays commitment to actions that have only been hinted at (Stevanovic 2011).
Deontic authority has been associated with the class of “directive-commissive actions” (Couper-Kuhlen 2014), including requests, proposals, and suggestions (directives), on the one hand, and offers, invitations, and promises (commissives), on the other. Still, deontic authority cannot be straightforwardly linked to any specific linguistic resources, such as imperatives or deontic modal verbs (e.g., ought, must, should, can, may and could). Although these resources are commonly used to issue orders and commands (Goodwin 1990: 83; Craven & Potter 2010: 442) and to establish what is obligatory, permissible, or forbidden (Curl & Drew 2008; Sterponi 2003; Zinken & Ogiermann 2011), the mere presence of these resources is not enough to make the utterance count as a claim of deontic authority, but participants’ own orientations also need to be considered.
The notion of entitlement overlaps with that of authority. A person may be entitled to knowledge (e.g., Gill 1998), which is a matter of epistemic authority. Entitlement with reference to action (Craven & Potter 2010; Curl & Drew 2008; Heinemann 2006) then again is a matter of deontic authority. As far as a person’s deontic authority is publicly displayed in their conduct (see also deontic stance), the notion of “entitlement to action” may be used interchangeably with that of deontic authority. However, deontic authority is not only about public conduct but about others orienting to a person as authoritative (see also deontic status). This has specific conceptual consequences. For example, in the context of requests, a person’s degree of entitlement has been argued to be inversely related to the amount of the contingencies surrounding the recipient’s compliance with the request (Curl & Drew 2008). Deontic authority, however, does not necessarily need to be curtailed by such a relation. A person with an extremely high level of deontic authority may be able to except compliance independent of how much trouble that compliance is associated with.
Sometimes deontic authority becomes relevant for the participants, not as a possession they might want to claim, but rather as something they seek to disclaim. Such attempts at “deontic symmetry” (Magnusson 2021; Stevanovic 2013; Thompson, et al. 2021; Weiste, et al. 2020) characterize, for example, joint decision making and proposals for joint activities in various contexts.
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