Getting others to share goods in Polish and Norwegian: Material and moral anchors for request conventions

Paweł Urbanik

doi:10.1515/ip-2020-0009

Artikel

Getting others to share goods in Polish and Norwegian: Material and moral anchors for request conventions

Paweł Urbanik
Paweł Urbanik is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. His areas of research are Interactional Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Pragmatics, and Polish and Norwegian grammar.

Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 18. April 2020

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Aus der Zeitschrift Intercultural Pragmatics Band 17 Heft 2

Abstract

The paper examines the formation of requests for sharing goods in Polish and Norwegian by focusing on the use of imperatives and Can I-interrogatives in informal settings. The study first identifies the contextual, material and embodied configurations that contribute to the selection of constructions. Then, it explores the moral roots of the divergent use of formats in similar configurations across the two languages. Employing a multimodal interactional-linguistic approach to comparable conversational data from Polish and Norwegian reality show corpora, the study demonstrates that the selection of format relies on the object’s control status and the requester’s orientation to contingencies. Imperatives are selected when the object is controlled by the requestee and no contingencies are recognized. Can I-interrogatives mark orientation to contingencies and have two realization patterns: Depending on whether the object is controlled by the requestee or not, they are used as transfer or permission requests, respectively. The study also reveals cultural differences in the selection of imperatives and transfer interrogatives across the languages. The Polish participants most often treated sharing as the requestee’s social obligation, using imperatives in the environments in which their Norwegian counterparts chose transfer interrogatives and marked that the requestee’s readiness to share was not taken for granted.

Keywords: Polish; Norwegian; requests; imperatives; interrogatives; sharing goods; action formation

About the author

Paweł Urbanik

Paweł Urbanik is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. His areas of research are Interactional Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Pragmatics, and Polish and Norwegian grammar.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jakob Steensig and Jan Svennevig for their invaluable comments on the early drafts of this article. My thanks also go to Janne Bondi Johannessen for dispelling any doubts concerning the Norwegian syntax. Last but not least, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for getting me to make this article better. Any mistakes are mine.

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Appendix 1

CA transcription symbols
(.): micropause less than 0.2 seconds
(0.3): pause in seconds and tenths of a second
[: beginning of overlapping talk
]: end of overlapping talk
=: latched talk between the speakers
↑↓: sharp changes in pitch (rise or fall)
?: strongly rising intonation
¿: slightly rising intonation
,: a bit rising intonation
_: level intonation
.: falling intonation contour
> <: faster talk
hh: audible exhaling
.hh: audible inhaling
w(h)ord: exhalation inside the boundaries of a word
word: stress
WORD: loud talk
wo::rd: sound prolongation or stretching
wor-: a cut-off
°word°: quieter talk
£word£: “smiley voice”
#word#: “creaky voice”
( ): unintelligible talk
(word/k): uncertain fragment (possible hearing)
((word)): transcriber comment
Multimodal transcription symbols
* *: two identical symbols delimit embodied actions and are synchronized with corresponding stretches of talk
¤ *: each symbol denotes a different participant
≫: the action begins before the excerpt’s beginning
*-->: the action continues across subsequent lines
-->*: the action ends at this point
-->>: action continues after the excerpt’s end
,,,,: action retraction
…………: action preparation
%Figure 1: the exact moment at which a given screen shot has been taken
fig: a screen shot line
piotr: participant doing the embodied action

Appendix 2

Glossing symbols
1, 2, 3: person
ACC: accusative
ADJ: adjective
ADV: adverb
ART: article
DAT: dative
DEF: definite
DIM: diminutive
FUT: future tense
GEN: genitive
IMP: imperative
INF: infinitive
INTJ: interjection
IPFV: imperfective aspect
NAME: proper noun
NEG: negation
PFV: perfective aspect
PL: plural
PRS: present tense
PRT: particle
PST: past tense
SG: singular
SUP: supine
VOC: vocative

Published Online: 2020-04-18

Published in Print: 2020-04-28

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2020-0009

Schlagwörter für diesen Artikel

Polish; Norwegian; requests; imperatives; interrogatives; sharing goods; action formation