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The putative preference for offers over requests

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Abstract

Requesting and offering are closely related, insofar as they are activities associated with someone’s need for assistance. It has been supposed (e.g. Schegloff 2007) that requests and offers are not equivalent actions – specifically that offers are preferred actions and requests are dispreferred. We review the evidence for this claim across a corpus of requests and offers and demonstrate that the empirical evidence does not support the claim for a putative preference for offers over requests. Further consideration of the often symbiotic relationships between requesting and offering, particularly in face-to-face interactions, reveals a more complex picture of the ways in which people recruit others to help, or in which others are mobilized to help.

Abstract

Requesting and offering are closely related, insofar as they are activities associated with someone’s need for assistance. It has been supposed (e.g. Schegloff 2007) that requests and offers are not equivalent actions – specifically that offers are preferred actions and requests are dispreferred. We review the evidence for this claim across a corpus of requests and offers and demonstrate that the empirical evidence does not support the claim for a putative preference for offers over requests. Further consideration of the often symbiotic relationships between requesting and offering, particularly in face-to-face interactions, reveals a more complex picture of the ways in which people recruit others to help, or in which others are mobilized to help.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgement vii
  4. Glossary of transcription conventions ix
  5. Requesting – from speech act to recruitment 1
  6. Human agency and the infrastructure for requests 35
  7. Benefactors and beneficiaries 55
  8. The putative preference for offers over requests 87
  9. On divisions of labor in request and offer environments 115
  10. The social and moral work of modal constructions in granting remote requests 145
  11. Two request forms of four year olds 171
  12. Orchestrating directive trajectories in communicative projects in family interaction 185
  13. How to do things with requests 215
  14. On the grammatical form of requests at the convenience store 243
  15. Requesting immediate action in the surgical operating room 269
  16. When do people not use language to make requests? 303
  17. “Requests” and “offers” in orangutans and human infants 335
  18. Subject Index 365
  19. Name Index 369
Requesting in Social Interaction
This chapter is in the book Requesting in Social Interaction
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.26.04ken

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgement vii
  4. Glossary of transcription conventions ix
  5. Requesting – from speech act to recruitment 1
  6. Human agency and the infrastructure for requests 35
  7. Benefactors and beneficiaries 55
  8. The putative preference for offers over requests 87
  9. On divisions of labor in request and offer environments 115
  10. The social and moral work of modal constructions in granting remote requests 145
  11. Two request forms of four year olds 171
  12. Orchestrating directive trajectories in communicative projects in family interaction 185
  13. How to do things with requests 215
  14. On the grammatical form of requests at the convenience store 243
  15. Requesting immediate action in the surgical operating room 269
  16. When do people not use language to make requests? 303
  17. “Requests” and “offers” in orangutans and human infants 335
  18. Subject Index 365
  19. Name Index 369
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