Craven and Potter - directives Disc Studs 2010.pdf (929.33 kB)
Download fileDirectives: entitlement and contingency in action
journal contribution
posted on 04.07.2014, 10:08 authored by Alexandra Craven, Jonathan PotterThis 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.
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