Requesting Responsibility: The Morality of Grammar in Polish and English Family Interaction - Couverture rigide

Zinken, Jörg

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0190210729 ISBN 13 : 9780190210724

Editeur : Oxford University Press Inc, 2016

Synopsis

This book examines requests for action in everyday contexts by analyzing natural video-recorded data of everyday interaction in British English and Polish families. Requests for carrying out little jobs-passing some object or fetching items from the next room -are pervasively relevant in contexts such as preparing and consuming food, caring for and playing with children. Requests therefore provide a useful window onto general qualities of human sociality as well as on aspects of cultural diversity. Jörg Zinken describes features of interactional context that people across cultures might be sensitive to in designing a request. In particular, the other person's locally observable commitment to a shared task emerges as a quality of context that systematically enters into the way a speaker builds a request. He then analyses the relationship between diversity across the grammatical resources of languages, and diversity in the action affordances provided by these structures. Focusing on grammatical structures that exist in Polish but not in English (impersonal deontic statements, a certain type of double imperative, and a grammaticalized distinction between perfective and imperfective verbal aspect), the analyses show that language-specific turn formats can index and project social orientations within the on-going interaction in culture-specific ways. By examining social actions at a fine level of grain, the book points a way toward an understanding of cultural diversity that avoids the pitfalls of cultural relativism.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Jörg Zinken is Research Fellow at Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. After completing a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), he worked as a Senior Lecturer, then Reader in Language and Communication, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth (UK) before joining the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim in 2014.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press Inc
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0190210729
• ISBN 13: 9780190210724
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 272
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Ufficio Anagrafiche Messaggerie; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italie