| The paper explores the intricate production of requests, i.e. the design of interactional turns in which speakers ask a recipient for something (e.g. a cellular telephone, a card or a cupcake) or ask a recipient to do something (e.g. to close a door, to wait or to lean over). It is shown that to form actions that are recognizable as requests, speakers draw on a wide range of turn-design features as well as the local interactional and material context. Previous research within conversation analysis has focused on the linguistic structures that are used for doing requests (e.g. Curl & Drew 2008; Heinemann 2006); the current study complements these findings with observations about the employment of other semiotic resources. The paper examines requests that serve to advance a current activity and to organize the current activity in relation to other ongoing activities; in other words, requests are seen as actions situated in complex social-interactional and material settings (e.g. Goodwin 2000). The data are drawn from video recordings of casual face-to-face and in-car conversations in English (from the Oulu Video Corpus of English and material in the research projects Talk & Drive and Habitable Cars). An examination of in-car conversations further sheds light on the potential constraints that may be brought in by the fixed yet mobile surrounds. |
