Directives: entitlement and contingency in action
Alexandra Craven
Jonathan Potter
2134/15123
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Directives_entitlement_and_contingency_in_action/9475664
This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s (2008) analysis of
entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur
in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children (three–eight-year-olds). While requests
are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives
embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This
lack of orientation to ability or desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When
examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during
the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather
than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences
involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded (more entitled and less
contingent) directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available
and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and
directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same.
2014-07-04 10:08:01
Conversation analysis
Directives
Discursive psychology
Eating
Family interaction
Mealtimes
Requests
Socialization
Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified
Studies in Human Society not elsewhere classified