28.3039, Review: English; Polish; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Zinken (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3039. Thu Jul 13 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3039, Review: English; Polish; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Zinken (2016)

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Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2017 13:10:45
From: Nicolas Ruytenbeek [nruytenb at ulb.ac.be]
Subject: Requesting Responsibility

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4174.html

AUTHOR: Jörg  Zinken
TITLE: Requesting Responsibility
SUBTITLE: The Morality of Grammar in Polish and English Family Interaction
SERIES TITLE: Foundations of Human Interaction
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Université Libre de Bruxelles

Reviews Editor: Robert A. Coté

SUMMARY

In this monograph, “Requesting Responsibility: The Morality of Grammar in
Polish and English Family Interaction,” author Jörg Zinken offers a detailed
analysis of the most frequent grammatical forms used in the social actions of
requesting (in a broad sense, including recruitment) in Polish and English
daily family interactions. Requesting Responsibility (RR) puts forward an
original take on cross-cultural comparisons of language practices. Assuming a
conversation analysis (CA) framework, Zinken also takes into account
non-verbal aspects of communication.

Chapter 1, “Studying Language and Mind in Action”, introduces the differences
between traditional linguistic relativism and the view advocated in the book.
Assuming that the primary function of language is to enable the performance of
social actions, meaning emerges from the interaction of grammatical form and
context, and interactional context is dynamic, Zinken’s primary purpose is to
show how the details of a language shape the variety of social actions in that
language.

In Chapter 2, “Requesting, Responsiveness, and Responsibility”, Zinken
explicitly differentiates the directive speech act of requesting and the more
general type of social actions that he calls Requesting (with small capitals).
The text focuses on Requesting, defined by Enfield (2009) in terms of a
speaker’s interactional move that makes relevant a responsive action from a
recipient (a practical action typically involving the manipulation of an
object). In the spirit of the subtitle of the book, Zinken highlights the
deontic aspects of Requesting sequences, i.e., responsiveness, which relates
to the notion of preferred response move of an adjacency pair (cf. Schegloff
2007), and responsibility, which concerns the rights and obligations of people
directly or indirectly involved in a conversation (cf. Niebuhr 1963).

Zinken starts his analysis of particular types of Requesting in Chapter 3,
“Nudging and Appealing: Two Imperative Actions for Requesting”. On the basis
of their typical home environment, regularities of turn design, and
orientations of the request recipient, he compares two types of imperative
actions -- imperative nudges and imperative appeals. Zinken proposes to
explain the frequent use of imperatives in daily interactions in terms of
people’s knowledge of the grounds on which they can expect one another to
cooperate. This explanation is in line with recent findings in CA concerning
the link between imperatives and immediacy of the requested action and
recipient’s entitlement (see, for instance, Curl & Drew 2008, Heinemann 2006,
Mondada 2011).

In Chapter 4, “The Comparability of Social Actions across Languages”, Zinken
puts forward the view that linguistic practices can be compared across
languages on the basis of the local contexts that are relevant to speakers. He
shows, for instance, that imperative nudges exist both in Polish and in
English, and that requests for assistance are much more frequent in English
than in Polish families. He also makes a strong case against the method
consisting in comparing similar linguistic expressions in different languages
without taking into account the whole contexts of interaction.

Chapter 5, “Two Forms of Responsibility: Contribution and Assistance”, further
deals with cultural differences between Polish and English daily family
interactions. These differences bear on how speakers and hearers orient
towards one another; in situations where English speakers typically ask for
assistance, Polish speakers prefer to presume the other person’s availability.
Such differences arise because, in similar situations, English and Polish
speakers make different assumptions about others’ intentions and ongoing
activities.

Chapter 6, “Building Occasions for Another’s Initiative: The Impersonal
Deontic Declarative trzeba X (“it is necessary to X”)”, examines the action of
pointing to an objective necessity in Polish, and how it can be distinguished
from requests for assistance, and how it resembles imperative appeals in some
respects. This chapter also includes a comparison between trzeba X and musimy
X (“we must X”), which expresses a necessity related to what the
conversational participants are currently doing.

Another construction which, like imperative appeals and trzeba X, treats
features of the environment as relevant grounds for expecting compliance, is
discussed in Chapter 7, “Calling Another to Social Reason”. Here, Zinken
demonstrates that this construction, the double imperative weź-V2 (take-V2),
is not properly analysed in the literature, which should have paid more
attention to interactional data. He also contrasts take-V2 in Polish with
another imperative construction that has an English equivalent, i.e., go-V2.

Chapter 8, “Directing Animation of Pre-Authored Actions”, addresses the
distribution of perfective and imperfective imperatives in Polish. The author
takes as the starting point of his discussion Lehmann (1989) and Benacchio
(2002), which he criticizes on the grounds that they fail to account for the
interactional components of aspect. More precisely, Zinken provides evidence
that these constructions express different claims about the authorship and
animacy of the requested action. In addition, these two constructions
typically do not occur in the same sort of situations and have distinct
behaviours in adjacency pairs. However, when they both are acceptable in a
given situation, they convey very different attitudes and expectations
concerning the request recipient.

The conclusion, Chapter 9, summarizes the main findings of the book and
provides the reader with a global picture of the connection between imperative
and deontic constructions and the claims expressed concerning the recipient’s
responsiveness/responsibility. In this final chapter, Zinken also stresses
that cultural differences in linguistic practices should be sought neither in
the grammar of the languages or in contextual parameters of the interaction,
but, rather, that culture is the point where grammatical forms and local
environments converge. Defining a social action as the combination of a
particular linguistic construction with a particular type of interactional
context, Zinken concludes that “speakers of Polish and speakers of English do
not just do the same things in slightly different ways; they do subtly but
consequentially different things” (p. 225).

EVALUATION

In the text, Zinken convincingly achieves his initial goal. In particular, he
demonstrates in a subtle and coherent way the relevance and viability of
cross-cultural comparisons of language practices, with a focus on the social
actions of Requesting. The method used and the conclusions drawn should be of
interest to any scholar in the field of conversation analysis and
socio-pragmatics. “Requesting Responsibility” provides a valuable contribution
to interactional linguistics, and an interesting (albeit indirect)
contribution to the study of speech acts and (im)politeness.

Throughout the book, one finds a fine-grained level of analysis of natural
conversational data, resulting in very interesting theoretical and
methodological discussions, and supported by a critical review of the
available literature. Zinken systematically provides appropriate background
information about the participants of the conversations and their activities.
It is useful to know that the video recordings referred to in the text can be
accessed on www.oup.com/us/requestingresponsibility.

Quite rightly, Zinken warns against equating a linguistic form, such as an
imperative construction, with a type of social action, such as a directive
speech act. He also stresses that one should not detach a linguistic
expression from the context of interaction in which it occurs, because they
are interdependent. He proposes instead that different constructions have
different relationships with the local contexts in which they are used. A
construction used in the performance of a social action of Requesting
typically conveys particular assumptions about the recipient(s) of the
request, their availability, what they are doing at the moment, etc., which
Zinken calls the “home environment” of the construction.

Another important methodological claim made in the book is that out-of-context
interpretations of grammatical forms do not allow a proper characterization of
these expressions. For instance, instead of minimal pairs differing only in
one respect, such as a Polish sentence with an imperfective imperative and the
same sentence with the perfective counterpart, Zinken insists that one study
the relationship between imperfective vs. perfective imperatives and the
features of the contexts of interaction they belong to. From such a
perspective, impoliteness is not a property of imperative constructions, but a
possible consequence of the inappropriate use of an imperative in a context
that does not correspond to its home environment.

In his discussion of spoken interactions, the author makes use of several
important notions such as cooperation, compliance, commitment, (in)directness.
Some of these notions are directly relevant to the topic of Requesting
Responsibility, but the way Zinken refers to them does not always make
explicit the definitions he is assuming. For instance, even though he is not
explicit on this, the “scale of directness” he is referring to (Chapter 6, pp.
109-10; see also Chapter 9, p. 224) originates in Brown & Levinson (1987) and
Blum-Kulka & Olshtain’s (1984) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project
(CCSARP), which raises the issue whether such a notion of (in)directness is
relevant to the analysis of the social actions of Requesting. Furthermore, the
connection between the social actions analysed by Zinken and considerations of
(im)politeness remains unclear. Another example is the concept of obligation
in the sense of Alston (2000), which is relevant to the discussion of
Requesting. The connection between appealing to A’s responsibility and the
creation of an obligation for A to carry out some action (or, at least, to
provide some acceptable reason for not doing so), remains unaddressed. A third
illustration concerns the author’s sometimes inconsistent appeal to
compliance. Since he explicitly differentiates the social action of Requesting
and the speech act of a request, saying that “some Requests can be
accomplished (and understood, and complied with) without words” (p. 26) and
that “addressed persons fit their compliance to different Requests” (p. 36) is
confusing, since compliance applies to requests and not necessarily to
Requesting in the more general sense (see also pp. 162-163).

Zinken provides very detailed discussions of conversational interactions in
British and Polish families, and the local contexts of the interactions are
well-described. That being said, two remarks are in order.

First, the author offers no quantitative analysis to support his claims -- a
few exceptions concern rare or unattested patterns (e.g., Chapter 5, p. 82;
“virtually absent”, p. 83; “predominantly”, and Chapter 7, p. 159; “The next
two cases are the only take-V2 Requests in the collection that can be analysed
as […]”) -- and when he does provide quantitative information, it is with
rather vague terms (e.g., Chapter 6, p. 128; “As with Polish musimy, we need x
is more often than not used in contexts in which both you and I need to do
something […]). In the absence of sufficient information about, e.g., sample
size, (dis)preferred linguistic strategies and frequencies of use of the
constructions involved in Requesting, the account developed in “Requesting
Responsibility” has little predictive power. This issue is not too worrisome,
however, insofar as Zinken’s primary aim, and primary achievement, is to offer
a qualitative analysis of the use of different grammatical constructions in
daily family interactions.

Second, little information about the socio-cultural background of the
participants is available; other interesting details that are missing concern
their age, who let the video camera record the interaction, how household
tasks are divided in a family -- all parameters that may influence the choice
of linguistic forms for Requesting, but do not seem to have systematically
been controlled for in “Requesting Responsibility”. As a result, it is unclear
whether the conclusions drawn in the book can be extended to a different
population.

A minor shortcoming of the text has to do with the role of silent pauses in
the shaping of different social actions. Zinken does not systematically
propose an interpretation of silence between conversational turns, and it is
unclear what he counts as a “noticeable” or “substantial” silence (pp.
210-11). When silences are addressed, as in Chapter 8, additional
justification would have been welcome to support the points made.

The author briefly addresses the “invariant meaning of grammatical resources”
(Chapter 9, p. 222), which leads the reader to wonder what the invariant
meaning of the other Polish imperative constructions addressed in “Requesting
Responsibility” would be. However, an interesting aspect of the book is that
it straightforwardly opens the path for further research both in theoretical
and experimental pragmatics. First, imperative constructions are central to
Requesting Responsibility, and Zinken’s analyses seem compatible with recent
minimal-semantic accounts of the imperative (e.g., von Fintel & Iatridou 2015,
Hanks 2015). Second, RR contains clear hypotheses than can be tested in
experimental studies devoted to the production and the comprehension of the
action of requesting. These hypotheses concern, for instance, what people
infer about others’ responsibilities and activities, and which linguistic
expressions they prefer in some situations.

A proofreading evaluation reveals few errors or typos: p. 42, second
paragraph; “Wotton” for “Wootton” (twice), p. 64, first sentence of the
paragraph; “comes in a the kind of…”, p. 73, final sentence of the second
paragraph; “that cannot to be taken for granted”, p. 84, first sentence of the
third paragraph; “quick an easy”, and p. 143, the first sentence of the second
paragraph; “line 13” for “line 15”.

Summing up, “Requesting Responsibility” is a very well-written book that
provides highly valuable insights into the cross-linguistic and interactional
aspects of the variety of social actions belonging to the category of
requesting.

REFERENCES

Alston, William P. 2000. Illocutionary acts and sentence meaning. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.

Benacchio, Rosanna. 2002. Konkurencija vidov, vežlivost’ i ètiket v russkom
imperative. Russian Linguistics 26: 149-178.

Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Elite Olshtain. 1984. Requests and apologies: A cross
cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied
Linguistics 5 (3): 196-213.

Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in
language usage. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Curl, Traci S. & Paul Drew. 2008. Contingency and action: a comparison of two
forms of requesting. Research on Language and Social Interaction 41: 1-25.

Enfield, Nick. 2009. The anatomy of meaning. Speech, gesture and composite
utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hanks, Peter. 2015. Propositional content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heinemann, Trinne. 2006. “Will you or can’t you?”: Displaying entitlement in
interrogative requests. Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1081-1104.

Lehmann, Volkmar. 1989. Pragmatic functions of aspects and their cognitive
motivation. In L. G. Larsson (Ed.), Proceedings of the second Scandinavian
symposium on aspectology, pp. 1-11, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Mondada, Lorenza. 2011. The situated organization of directives in French:
Imperatives and action coordination in video games. Nottingham French Studies
50 (2): 19-50.

Niebuhr, Helmut R. 1963. The responsible self: An essay in Christian moral
philosophy. New York: Harper & Row.

Schegloff, Emanuel. 2007. Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in
conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2015. A modest proposal for the meaning of
imperatives. In Modality across syntactic categories, edited by Ana Arregui,
Marisa Rivero, & Andrés Pablo Salanova. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Nicolas Ruytenbeek recently completed a PhD in Linguistics at the Université
libre de Bruxelles (2017). In his dissertation, he investigates the mechanics
of indirect directive speech acts, both from a theoretical and experimental
perspective. His main research interests are linguistic approaches to
politeness, speech act comprehension and production and, more generally,
issues bearing on the semantics/pragmatics interface.





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