Requesting in Social Interaction

There has been a remarkable revival of interest in how we conduct social actions in interaction – particularly in requesting, where recent research into video-recorded face-to-face interaction has taken our understanding in novel directions. This collection brings together some of the latest, cutting-edge research into requesting by leading international practitioners of Conversation Analysis. The studies trace a line of conceptual development from ‘directive’ to ‘recruitment’, and explore the acquisitional, cultural, situational and species-specific differentiation of forms for requesting in human social interaction.They represent the latest explorations into the complexities and controversies associated with the apparently simple but essential matter of how we ask another to do something for us.

Beishui Liao and Xiaojun Zhou, Zhejiang University, in Discourse Studies, Vol. 19.1, 2017:
The volume is a pioneering work which regards requesting as a way in which one person recruits another’s assistance and analyzes it combining social, semiotic and linguistic forms in different interactional and sequential contexts. It is highly recommended for scholars who are working in the field of daily conversation analysis and social interaction.