# Getting others to do things

A pragmatic typology of recruitments

Edited by Simeon Floyd Giovanni Rossi N. J. Enfield

Studies in Diversity Linguistics 31

### Studies in Diversity Linguistics

### Editor: Martin Haspelmath

In this series:

# Getting others to do things

A pragmatic typology of recruitments

Edited by

Simeon Floyd Giovanni Rossi N. J. Enfield

Floyd, Simeon, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield (eds.). 2020. *Getting others to do things*: *A pragmatic typology of recruitments* (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 31). Berlin: Language Science Press.

This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/263 © 2020, the authors Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Indexed in EBSCO ISBN: 978-3-96110-278-5 (Digital) 978-3-96110-279-2 (Hardcover)

ISSN: 2363-5568 DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4017493 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/263 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=263

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# **Contents**

# **Chapter 1**

# **Recruitments and pragmatic typology**

# Giovanni Rossi

Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

# Simeon Floyd Department of Anthropology, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

# N. J. Enfield

Department of Linguistics, The University of Sydney

# **1 Introduction**

Getting others to do things is a central part of social interaction in any human society. Language is our main tool for this purpose. In this book, we show that sequences of interaction in which one person's behavior solicits or occasions another's assistance or collaboration share common structural properties that provide a basis for the systematic comparison of this domain across languages. The goal of this comparison is to uncover similarities and differences in how language and other conduct are used in carrying out social action around the world, including different kinds of requests, orders, suggestions, and other actions brought together under the rubric of *recruitment* (see §4 below). The project constitutes an exercise in pragmatic typology. We map out a possibility space for linguisticallymediated social actions and we use that possibility space as a grid for comparison between languages. This allows us to look for universals and cross-linguistic variation in this pragmatic domain. While other multi-authored publications present comparative findings from this project (e.g. Floyd et al. 2018), this book lays out the conceptual and methodological background for the project (Chapters 1–2)

Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield. Recruitments and pragmatic typology. In Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield (eds.), *Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments*, 1–23. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4018370

Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

and presents the findings language-by-language (Chapters 3–10). The book is intended to serve as a reference source for those interested in primary data on the phenomenon of recruitments in a diverse set of the world's languages.

# **2 Background on research on getting others to do things**

A landmark in research on requests and similar speech acts is Searle (1969; 1975), who built on Austin (1962). For Searle, speech acts have felicity conditions, which need to be met if the act is to succeed. For a request, the utterance should refer to a future act of the recipient and the speaker should believe that the recipient can do the requested act, among other conditions (Searle 1969: 66). Many of Searle's felicity conditions refer to mental states of participants. Building on this and the cognitively-grounded theory of Grice (1975), Brown & Levinson (1978; 1987) developed a theory of politeness in which requests featured prominently. The theory began with observations of similarities in pragmatic strategies in three unrelated languages and cultures (Tamil, Tzeltal and English). A theory of face – people's public self-image (Goffman 1967) – suggested universal pressures affecting social behavior, particularly in "face-threatening acts" such as requests.

Researchers in psychology engaged with the ideas of Searle, Grice, Brown & Levinson, seeking to test them with experimental methods. One puzzle concerned the literal meaning of an utterance (e.g. *Can you pass the salt?*) in the comprehension of the intended request, that is, whether or not the literal meaning must be computed first before inferring that a request is being made (Clark & Lucy 1975; Clark 1979; Gibbs 1979; Clark & Schunk 1980; Gibbs 1983; 1986a). Another puzzle concerned variation of request forms in terms of a single general principle: when making a request, a speaker first assesses what reason there might be for the recipient not complying, and then formulates an utterance to deal with the "greatest potential obstacle" they can anticipate (Gibbs 1985; Francik & Clark 1985;Gibbs 1986b;Gibbs & Müller 1988; Clark 1996).The obstacle mentioned may be generic, such as the recipient's inability to do what is requested (e.g. *Can you tell me what time it is?*), or more specific, such as the availability of a relevant object (e.g. *Do you happen to have a watch?*). This is closely related to the ideas of preconditions discussed by Searle (1969) and by Gordon & Lakoff (1971).

Linguists have studied the grammatical structures and pragmatic properties of the basic sentence types, all of which are used in requesting: imperatives, interrogatives, declaratives (Gordon & Lakoff 1971; Sadock & Zwicky 1985;Aikhenvald & Dixon 2017). They have also studied the connections between alternative lin-

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guistic forms and social variables in events of requesting (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975; Ervin-Tripp 1976; 1981; Gordon & Ervin-Tripp 1984; Ervin-Tripp et al. 1990), including how these variables may affect the comprehension of the request.

A large body of research in the subfield of "cross-cultural pragmatics" (e.g. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) has been devoted to the comparative study of linguistic patterns associated with requests across many languages. A unifying element of this tradition of research is a standardized methodology based on "discourse completion tasks" (Blum-Kulka 1982). In §5 below, we further discuss this tradition of research in relation to our pragmatic typological approach.

Research in the fields of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and interactional linguistics is perhaps closest to the approach taken here, for a few reasons. One is that the empirical source of data is recordings of informal interaction. Another is that the units of analysis are not clauses or sentences but moves in conversational sequences (Wootton 1981; 1997; Lindström 2005; Vinkhuyzen & Szymanski 2005; Heinemann 2006; Curl & Drew 2008; Craven & Potter 2010; Zinken & Ogiermann 2013; Drew & Couper-Kuhlen 2014a, among many others). These inductive approaches are grounded in the sequential development of interaction. Most conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic studies of requesting to date have concentrated on a particular language. Comparison between languages has been only possible by drawing on results of distinct studies, each with their own particular focus and goals. Also, most conversation-analytic research tends not to be transparently quantitative. But structured quantitative analysis built on the back of a qualitative analysis has been shown to greatly enhance the analytic possibilities of comparative conversation analysis (e.g. Fox et al. 2009; Rossano et al. 2009; Stivers et al. 2009; Dingemanse et al. 2015).

The pragmatic domain of getting others to do things has been thought of in different ways. A first distinction is often made between getting someone to carry out a practical action and getting someone to provide information. Some work in the philosophy of language (e.g. Searle 1969) and in psycholinguistics (e.g. Clark 1979; Clark & Schunk 1980) tended to merge the two. But most work has distinguished between soliciting practical action and information, and has studied them as separate phenomena.

Another distinction has to do with the categorization of types or subtypes of social action. Two main approaches can be identified here. The first is to treat the domain of getting others to do things as a family of related but distinct speech acts or actions (e.g. directives, requests, hints) on the basis of distinct semantic/pragmatic features, for example those defining different degrees of forcefulness or coerciveness (e.g. Searle 1976; Wierzbicka 1991; Craven & Potter 2010). Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

The second approach is to treat the domain as a single, generic type of social action, and to treat variations in the way this is implemented as pertaining to the level of linguistic practice (e.g. Ervin-Tripp et al. 1990; Wootton 1997; Rossi 2012).

Yet another distinction is drawn in terms of the temporality of the practical action being solicited: whether the action is carried out immediately, at the same place and time – such as passing a knife in a kitchen setting – or distally, at a later time and possibly different place – such as picking somebody up from work (see, e.g., Lindström 1999). Although much research encompasses both, studies of telephone calls obviously privilege the latter, whereas studies of face-to-face interaction privilege the former.

# **3 Background to the project and studies presented in this book**

The conceptual, empirical, and analytical work on recruitments presented in this volume was carried out by a team of researchers under the auspices of the *Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use* (HSSLU) project, a European Research Council Starting Grant awarded to Nick Enfield (2010–2014). The Recruitments Subproject was coordinated by Simeon Floyd and Giovanni Rossi, and was convened at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in collaboration with other members of the Interactional Foundations of Language project in Stephen Levinson's Language and Cognition Department (also encompassing Levinson's European Research Council Advanced Grant IN-TERACT, 2011–2015).

The authors of the chapters of this book each contributed to the comparative study in a number of ways. All contributed to the conceptual development of the project, including the content of the coding scheme, administering the coding scheme, and analyzing the results. Collection of video corpora used in the study was carried out by Julija Baranova (Russian), Joe Blythe (Murrinhpatha), Mark Dingemanse (Siwu), N. J. Enfield (Lao), Simeon Floyd (Cha'palaa), Giovanni Rossi (Italian, English) and Jörg Zinken (Polish).1 Steve Levinson provided the context for this project to thrive, and was a key interlocutor at all points throughout the project. As an external collaborator, Paul Drew was present for many of the research meetings, and contributed much to the methodology and conception

1Part of the English data came from the Language and Social Interaction Archive created by Leah Wingard, available from San Francisco State University (http://www.sfsu.edu/~lsi/).

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of the project. Séan G. Roberts provided crucial advice and assistance in developing the quantitative aspects of the comparative analysis (not reported in this volume). The coding and data analysis workflow built on and extended work in a closely related subproject of HSSLU that developed a pragmatic typology of other-initiated repair, coordinated by Mark Dingemanse and Nick Enfield. We also owe a debt to conceptual collaborators in discussion and data analysis over the life of the project: Lorena Pool Balam, Penelope Brown, Tyko Dirksmeyer, Paul Drew, Rósa S. Gísladóttir, Gertie Hoymann, Stephen C. Levinson, Lilla Magyari, Elizabeth Manrique, Ruth Parry, Séan G. Roberts, Jack Sidnell, Tanya Stivers and Francisco Torreira.

The development of the recruitments concept and the timeline of the project work and findings is as follows.2

The HSSLU project, which began in January 2010, featured three subprojects. One of these centered on actions of getting people to do things. On 7–9 October 2010, team members discussed requests and similar kinds of social actions in a UCLA workshop on "Action Ascription in Social Interaction". At a follow-up workshop on the same topic in Nijmegen on 18–19 March 2011, Enfield presented a first working definition of "recruitment" (Enfield 2011a). This was a reference point for a one-week intensive data workshop on recruitments held later that month (March 21–25, 2011), in which team members, together with Paul Drew as an external collaborator, delved into data and initial qualitative analysis of candidate recruitment sequences in the languages represented in this volume.

This collaborative work, along with a subsequent session on recruitments at a HSSLU project retreat on 20 April 2011 (Enfield 2011b), resulted in a first draft of the coding scheme for this volume, authored by Floyd and Rossi, and circulated within the project team on 25 October 2011. The project team met (on 27 March 2012) to discuss the first draft coding scheme. Notes by Floyd and Rossi were then circulated, followed by circulation of an updated coding draft on 16 April 2012.

In October 2012, a subgroup of team members – Enfield, Floyd, Rossi, and Dingemanse – carried out a first pilot study using the coding scheme. On November 2, 2012, Floyd presented the ongoing results of the recruitments project at a retreat at Schloss Ringberg, Germany. Later that month, the group met to discuss and plan a second pilot study (with a new coding scheme draft version 1.3), this time with all team members participating. During the week of November 20–27, 2012, the full team carried out a pilot of the coding scheme on all of the languages included in this volume. In December 2012, team members identified

2 See http://recruitments.nickenfield.org/timeline/ for PDFs of the documents and memos mentioned in the rest of this section.

Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

cases in their respective corpora for coding, and on January 20, 2013, the coding scheme was finalized (version 2.2). The full team then held an intensive coding week (January 21–25, 2013), following a shared set of further instructions circulated to the team by Floyd.

After the coding was completed, a coding consistency check was done, followed by a test for coder reliability across the team members. This process was overseen by Floyd and Rossi. Because each team member worked with data in languages that others had no access to, our coder reliability check was carried out using a reference set of English data. The reliability check established that some questions were coded in the same ways across the group, but it also revealed that some questions had not been coded consistently. The final step was for the team to carry out a re-coding of those questions in order to ensure coder reliability. The re-coding took place in December 2013.

Results of the comparative study were publicly presented in February 2014 by Floyd and Rossi at the UCLA workshop "About Face" (Floyd et al. 2014a), and then in June 2014 at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis at UCLA (Floyd et al. 2014b). The June 2014 presentation not only publicized the empirical findings of the comparative project, it also presented the key conceptual elements of our collective development of the concept of recruitment sequences. Other publications in which these ideas and findings have been discussed include Enfield (2014b), Drew & Couper-Kuhlen (2014b), Rossi (2015), Kendrick & Drew (2016), Zinken & Rossi (2016), and Floyd (2017).

While comparative findings from this project are presented in multi-authored publications (Floyd et al. 2014b; 2018), the present collection was convened as an opportunity for the individual researchers to lay out the project findings specific to their language of study.

# **4 Recruitment sequences defined**

Our use of the term *recruitment* reflects a shift from an approach centered around the speech act of requesting to one addressing the interactional process of getting others to act. The two main alternatives to our *recruitments* approach are: i) a definition of the phenomenon based on intentional states, such as someone's desire to have another do something, and ii) a definition of the phenomenon based on linguistic form, for example, focusing on imperatively-formatted utterances. While the former presents problems of evidence, the latter overly limits the scope, as we know that other types of strategies can be used in seeking assistance or collaboration. Our functional approach based on recruitment sequences in recorded

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social interaction makes the identification of cases more objective and replicable, the analysis more falsifiable, and comparison across languages easier thanks to the natural control provided by sequential structure (Dingemanse & Floyd 2014), without having to restrict the scope of relevant linguistic patterns beforehand.

As we define it, a recruitment is a basic cooperative phenomenon in interaction consisting of a sequence of two moves with the following characteristics:3

Crucial to this phenomenon is the nature of the behavior instigated in Move B: a *practical* action involving physical work, typically the transfer of an object, the performance of a manual task, or the alteration of an ongoing bodily movement.

In this project, we restrict the target phenomenon by focusing on the recruitment of practical actions to be performed here and now. The recruitment of information and of future practical actions are excluded. At the same time, we are inclusive of any communicative behavior that causes someone to do something, independently of its verbal or nonverbal construction, and of whatever the speaker's exact intention may be. The identification of cases does not turn on the form of the instigating behavior but on the nature of the behavior instigated, and on the causal relation between the two.

Because of our focus on here-and-now cooperation, Move A and Move B must be temporally adjacent. This means that B must begin to deal with what A has said or done in the next few moments. In some cases, the provision of assistance or collaboration may be displaced because B initiates repair or defers fulfillment on some grounds (e.g. because they are momentarily busy). What is important is that the first response addresses the relevance of immediate cooperation. This obtains also when B refuses to fulfill the recruitment. Finally, there are cases in which B may ignore Move A and produce no response, or a response that does not address the relevance of their immediate cooperation. In these cases, additional measures are taken to preserve objectivity in the identification and inclusion of cases. When there is no uptake of the recruitment, we only consider cases in which: i) Move A involves an explicit, on-record practice, typically a

3By *move* we intend a unit of communicative behavior that may include language and/or other conduct (Enfield 2013: chap. 6; cf. Goffman 1981). This is a related but distinct concept to *turn*, which we understand as a move involving primarily language (see Schegloff 2007: 3–7).

### Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

linguistic practice, that is known to regularly solicit compliance with recruitment (e.g. imperatives, explicit interrogatives such as *Can you x*, etc.); ii) Move A is repeated, either in the same or in another form, showing pursuit of response. These criteria mean that we exclude cases of implicit, off-record practices that could have potentially led to someone doing something but did not, and were not pursued. Finally, note that in cases in which the recruitment is fulfilled or granted in Move B, the sequence may be minimally expanded with a further move – Move C – registering appreciation or satisfaction, in other words, acknowledgment by A.

Recruitment sequences encompass a broad range of actions and interactional events that result in someone providing assistance or collaboration. Our definition does not restrict the focus to request-related events but includes offer-related events, where assistance is provided in response to someone's trouble (Curl 2006). The coding scheme, presented in Chapter 2, helps to distinguish offer-related events from others, while providing a framework for treating both as part of the broader phenomenon of recruitment.4 The scheme also suggests criteria for discriminating between offers that are occasioned by another's trouble and offers that are not (p. 28).

Across the volume, we examine different kinds of recruitment events, from ones in which someone is told or asked to do something, to others in which someone responds to another's statement of need (individual or collective), to yet others in which someone responds to a wordless gesture requiring cooperation. Each chapter surveys a range of actions, sequential structures, and socialinteractional relations between recruiter and recruitee. The cooperative events we examine include both ones in which a participant is recruited to assist another in the realization of an individual goal and ones in which a participant is recruited to collaborate in the realization of a joint goal, involving shared commitments and responsibilities (Enfield 2014b; Zinken & Rossi 2016).

The components of a recruitment sequence and the terminology to describe them can be summarized as follows.

A recruitment seqence minimally involves:

4The coding scheme and the extensive collaborative work that contributed to its development (see §3 and fn. 2) predate a study by Kendrick & Drew (2016) that built on this collaborative work and used data collected within the project.

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	- **–** fulfillment: a practical action involving physical work performed for or with A;
	- **–** rejection: the conveyance of inability or unwillingness to fulfill the recruitment;
	- **–** deferment of fulfillment;
	- **–** initiation of repair (often leading to fulfillment after repair).

If B ignores Move A, then the sequence must include an explicit, on-record practice of initiating recruitment and/or pursuit of response in order to be included.

The sequence can be expanded by a move c, doing acknowledgment.

The coding scheme (Chapter 2) provides detailed commentary and examples, elaborating on each element of recruitment sequences and on the criteria for their identification presented in summary form here.

# **5 Pragmatic typology**

Pragmatic typology is the comparative study of language use. It brings together conceptual and analytic tools from a range of disciplines including linguistics, conversation analysis, gesture studies, and anthropology. A key innovation of the approach in relation to tools for analysis in linguistics is the reference to features of a sequentially ordered exchange of actions in conversation, including the temporal unfolding of such exchange, and its social and normative context. Further, because of the reliance on video corpora, it incorporates both verbal and nonverbal conduct in the analysis of sequences of action. We are faced with the challenge that faces any comparative linguist, namely the need to distinguish between language-particular descriptive categories and language-independent comparative categories or "comparative concepts" (Haspelmath 2010). We submit that our appeal to features of conversational organization – outside the usual realm of "concepts" in the semantic sense – is an advance in the search for tools for linguistic comparison.

A landmark effort to carry out comparative pragmatics was the subfield of "cross-cultural pragmatics", launched in the 1980s. Building on speech act theory

### Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

and politeness theory, cross-cultural pragmatics has studied the realization of requests across a large number of languages.5 This work was motivated, on the one hand, by a search for similarities and differences in the use of language across cultures, and on the other hand, by an interest in the acquisition and development of pragmatic competence (see Woodfield 2008 for a review). Studies in this tradition have provided insights into culture-specific features of politeness and directness, and produced rich inventories of request realization patterns. However, these advances in systematic comparison of speech acts across languages have been limited by their methodology. By using written elicitation, in the form of a "discourse completion task", this work relied on speakers' metalinguistic beliefs about appropriate usage, rather than on direct observation of actual usage in situ. A first problem with this is that we cannot be sure if speakers' intuitions match with what they do in practice. A second problem is that such an approach is relatively low in ecological validity, and does not provide access to the kinds of empirical evidence that direct and repeated observation of behavior in recordings can provide.

Our approach to pragmatic typology has two fundamental elements: (i) the empirical analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior in video recordings of naturally occurring interaction across languages, and (ii) a coding-based methodology for systematic comparison (see also Dingemanse & Enfield 2015; Rossi 2020). In some previous comparative work in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, the comparison emerges from the cumulative results of distinct studies, each with their own particular focus and goals; this applies, for instance, to collections of studies of questioning (Steensig & Drew 2008), person reference (Enfield & Stivers 2007) and change-of-state tokens (Heinemann & Koivisto 2016). In other cases, the comparison is designed in advance and carried out jointly by reference to a common focus. Studies of this kind have examined, among other phenomena, the intersection of self-repair and turn-taking (Fox et al. 1996), otherinitiated repair (Egbert 1996; Egbert et al. 2009), epistemically authoritative second assessments (Sidnell & Enfield 2012), and requests (Zinken 2016). Finally, some structured comparisons involve a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, including a coding scheme with a battery of standardized questions asked of hundreds of cases for each language; these include studies of gaze behavior (Rossano et al. 2009), turn-taking (Stivers et al. 2009), self-repair (Fox et al. 2009; 2010), question-answer sequences (Enfield et al. 2010), and other-initiated

5 See House & Kasper (1981), Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), Sifianou (1992), Lee-Wong (1994), Le Pair (1996), Márquez-Reiter (2000), Tsuzuki et al. (2005), Rue & Zhang (2008), Félix-Brasdefer (2009), Ogiermann (2009), Peterson (2010), among many others.

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repair (Dingemanse et al. 2015). The project reported on in this book falls within the third group. Ours is a mixed methodology in six defined steps, outlined in the next section.

# **6 A six-step method**

We now describe our six-step method for comparative team-based pragmatic typological research. We outline the process in idealized form, in part as a description of what we have done in this project and in part as a recipe for carrying out subsequent pragmatic typological team projects on other aspects of social interaction.

Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

> as necessary background to the analysis of the corpora, along with the relevant biographical and ethnographic background. This means that the "Transcribe" step will likely require between 9 and 12 months of dedicated fieldwork. This is a valuable investment with broader payoff. An important outcome of this step is that these corpora will then be available for further research in the future.

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researchers in Step 4 was done in the same way (as Dingemanse et al. 2015 do for other-initiated repair).

**Step 6. Model:** This final step involves statistical modeling of the coding results from Step 4. The data resulting from the large-scale coding scheme enables statistical modeling for quantitative assessment of patterns of association and interdependence between the phenomena coded for (as formulated in Step 3 and executed in Step 4). It is necessary to use multivariate statistics to control for interdependence among these variables (see Dingemanse et al. 2015 for an example of this). Steps 5 and 6 do not take a long time, but require special expertise.

This protocol requires a team science approach. Given the demanding combination of fieldwork (Steps 1, 2), expertise in comparative linguistics, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis (Steps 3, 4), and quantitative approaches (Steps 5, 6), this could never have been done in any way other than by a team. Team science in linguistics is still rare and we were fortunate to have had the opportunity to do this here.

The findings reported in the language-specific chapters in this volume are primarily the product of qualitative analysis but also include quantitative findings particular to each data set.

# **7 Data**

This study is based on the analysis of corpora of audiovisual recordings of informal everyday language usage in social interaction in eight languages from five continents (see Figure 1). In building these corpora, we placed unattended cameras in household and community contexts to record social interactions as they were occurring naturally, using high standards for audio and video quality (see Step 1 discussed in §6 for more details).

The data were transcribed and translated by a language expert (see Table 1) with assistance from native speakers. The corpora range in size from about ten to over ninety hours of footage. In some cases, the corpus represents the largest available database for the language, especially in the case of unwritten minority languages like Cha'palaa (Chapter 3), Murrinhpatha (Chapter 7), and Siwu (Chapter 10). For larger-scale national languages like Italian, Lao, Polish, and Russian, other corpora may be available to some degree, but most of these are limited to written language, due to the intensive demands of transcription of spoken language.

Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

Figure 1: World map showing locations of data collection for the eight languages involved in the study (Credit: satellite composition of Earth's surface by NASA).

Sampling procedures and criteria for inclusion/exclusion are detailed in Chapter 2.

# **8 This book**

The goal of this book is two-fold: to document the conceptual and methodological framework of our project (especially here and in Chapter 2) and to provide detailed qualitative/quantitative analyses of recruitment sequences in each of the eight languages: Cha'palaa, English, Italian, Lao, Murrinhpatha, Polish, Russian, and Siwu. Each language-specific study gives an overview of linguistic, gestural, sequential, and contextual features of recruitment sequences, following the categories defined in the coding scheme. While written to stand independently, the eight chapters adopt the coding scheme's common reference structure to facilitate navigation and comparison. At the same time, the chapters develop aspects and topics that are specific to each language and data.

By focusing on the phenomenon of recruitments, this large-scale collaborative study examines a domain of social action in interaction in which social relations are exploited, maintained, and potentially tested. We find that cross-linguistic diversity in this pragmatic domain is relatively low, considerably lower than the

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Table 1: Languages covered in this volume, data sources, coding credits.

diversity observed in phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic systems. This is in line with the idea that a species-wide infrastructure for interaction underpins the use of language, largely independent of the specific shape of that language (see Levinson 2000; 2006; Schegloff 2006; Enfield 2013; Enfield & Sidnell 2013; Stivers et al. 2009; Dingemanse et al. 2015). This is not to say that these pragmatic systems are identical. The chapters of this book show that there are differences. But we are struck by the commonalities that our approach reveals in a domain of language where many might expect to find radical variation.

 Thank you also to our collaborators for their input and intellectual engagement (see §3) and to our reviewers who helped to improve the volume enormously with their constructive commentary. We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Sebastian Nordhoff who directed the production of the volume with great generosity and patience. We gratefully acknowledge our funding bodies: the European Research Council (INTERACT and HSSLU projects), the Max Planck Society (Language and Cognition Department, directed by Stephen C. Levinson), the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Australian Research Council, and the Academy of Finland.

# **References**

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Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

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Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

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Giovanni Rossi, Simeon Floyd & N. J. Enfield

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# **Chapter 2**

# **A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction**

# Simeon Floyd

Department of Anthropology, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

# Giovanni Rossi

Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

# N. J. Enfield

Department of Linguistics, The University of Sydney

This chapter provides an annotated coding scheme for analyzing recruitment sequences in video-recorded social interaction. The scheme provided a basis for the research presented in the eight language-specific chapters of this book, and as such it gives necessary context for understanding the comparative project reported on here and in associated work. It is also intended to serve as a stepping stone for other researchers to use in the analysis of recruitment sequences in other languages. The scheme features guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences among instances. The questions and categories featured in the scheme are motivated by inductive observations of interactional data, grounded in the framework outlined in the introduction to this volume.

# **1 Introduction**

The present coding scheme provides a way to systematically analyze a core set of formal and interactional features of recruitment sequences (defined in Chapter 1, §4). The scheme is the product of the collaborative qualitative study of such sequences in different languages, based on the analysis of video recordings

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield. A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction. In Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield (eds.), *Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments*, 25–50. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4018372

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

of social interaction and focusing on the details of language and other conduct surrounding recruitments. Such analysis allowed us to identify recurrent socialinteractional dimensions and patterns of language usage, leading to the formulation of questions aimed at capturing these aspects in different languages. The coding scheme is therefore inductively derived from an iterative process of observation, analysis, and group discussion of naturally occurring data (see also Stivers & Enfield 2010; Dingemanse et al. 2016, among others).

The coding scheme (§6) is preceded by a definition of the phenomenon (§2), further specifications for inclusion/exclusion of a case from the data considered (§3), instructions for sampling and collecting cases (§4), and general guidelines for coding (§5). The questions and entries in the body of the scheme are extensively annotated to aid in the understanding of distinctions and replicability of coding.1

Besides documenting the analytical procedure of the project, the scheme is published here as a reference for future work, to foster comparable and cumulative research in the interactional domain of recruitment. The scheme can be applied to any type of face-to-face naturally occurring interaction featuring people getting others to do things for or with them.

# **2 Definition and terminology**

Recruitment sequences are defined as in Chapter 1, §4. A recruitment sequence is a sequence of two moves with the following characteristics:

For the purpose of this coding scheme, the following components of a recruitment seqence are identified:

• two participants: A (the recruiter) producing the instigating action, and B (the recruitee) responding to it;

1We include all of the original questions and entries. However, note that a few categories were not coded with sufficient reliability by the researchers involved in this project; such categories may require further training and calibration of coders, or else reformulation to make reliable coding possible.

2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

	- **–** fulfillment: a practical action involving physical work performed for or with A;
	- **–** rejection: the conveyance of inability or unwillingness to fulfill the recruitment;
	- **–** deferment of fulfillment;
	- **–** initiation of repair (often leading to fulfillment after repair).

If B ignores Move A, then the sequence must include an explicit, on-record practice of initiating recruitment and/or pursuit of response in order to be included.

The sequence can be expanded by a move c, doing acknowledgment.

# **3 Further specifications for the inclusion/exclusion of cases**

In including and excluding cases for coding, there are a number of further specifications that can help to delimit the phenomenon of recruitment from other kinds of related sequences of interaction.

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

	- i) After the table is set, A looks around in search of her plate, which is missing; B notices this and walks to the kitchen to get it.
	- ii) As A begins to eat her hamburger, B notices that the hamburger does not contain mayonnaise and passes the mayonnaise jar to A.

The first case should be included insofar as having a plate is necessary for A to be able to eat, as displayed by A's looking for it. The second case should be excluded insofar as the additional ingredient is not necessary for A to be able to have her hamburger, as shown by the fact that she is already eating it.

	- A: *Give me a knife*
	- B: ((gets the knife))
	- B: *Here you are* « not a separate seqence
	- A: ((reaches out to grab knife)) «

These should not be considered as separate recruitment sequences. At the same time, dependent or responsive recruitments should be distinguished from cases in which a practical action is independently recruited to deal with a contingency arising along the way toward the fulfillment of an earlier recruitment. For example:

These should be analyzed as two overlapping or nested recruitment sequences.

2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

5. **Repair initiation and solution.** When B responds to A's first attempt at recruitment (e.g. *I need a knife*) with repair initiation (e.g. *A knife?*) and A then provides a repair solution (e.g. *Yes*), this repair solution should be considered as Move A of a subsequent, separate recruitment case with its own unique identifier, even though the two cases belong to the same sequence (the sequential position of cases is coded in C01 below).

	- i) The vocative functions as a recruitment pursuit after one or more earlier attempts at recruitment have been made, e.g.

# **4 Guidelines for sampling interactions and collecting cases**

Coding must be based on a systematic and coherent collection of recruitment sequences from a broad sample of face-to-face interactions. The sample should include a range of different activities, settings, and speakers; it should contain both dyadic and multi-person interactions; and it should span both interactions that are task-focused (e.g. playing a game, preparing food, doing work together) Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

and others that are talk-focused (e.g. just gossiping or chatting). Below are some guidelines for systematically sampling interactions and collecting cases.

The goal of these guidelines is to construct a sample that is representative of the diversity of the corpus at hand. How well this diversity represents social interaction in the target language will depend on how the corpus as a whole has been built.

# **5 General coding guidelines**

The coding sheet should contain a transcript of the core interactional moves of each recruitment sequence, including a basic transcription of verbal elements and a concise description of nonverbal elements (see §6 A. Basic data, below). This transcript is intended to make the coding data intelligible to other analysts and as a reference for coding; however, it is often not enough to be able to accurately code certain features of the sequence, for example, the strengthening of the recruiting move by means of prosody (question C11) or the visibility of a target object (question E05). For this reason, coding should be based whenever possible on direct inspection of audio and video streams, possibly supported by a more detailed transcript of the larger interaction.

### 2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

When in doubt, coders should choose the most conservative coding choice, or a choice that best reflects the potential equivocalness of the feature in question, or the "can't tell" option, if available. For any coding decision, coders should be able to provide a reasoned argument and evidence to support it. Comments about particular coding choices should be entered in a notes field at the end of the sheet so as to be available to other analysts examining the coding and as a bridge between the complexity of human behavior and its reduced representation in coding data (Stivers 2015).

In this project, we decided to compile a glossary of certain verbal practices that make up a language's repertoire of resources for initiating and responding to recruitment, including modal constructions (C07), mitigators and strengtheners (C11), and benefactive markers (C12). The coding process provides an opportunity for easily compiling such a glossary by creating an entry in a dedicated tab of the coding sheet every time a recurrent practice is identified in connection with a coding question. Questions suitable for glossary entries are marked with a superscript "gl" (e.g. C07gl).

# **6 The coding scheme**

### **A. Basic data**

This section records the basic data for every recruitment sequence, including Moves A and B. Each case has a unique identifier, which is used to locate it in a recording, refer to it in qualitative analysis, and for statistical purposes in quantitative analysis. Verbal elements are transcribed and translated and nonverbal elements are concisely described to make cases intelligible to other analysts.

### A01 **Language**

A02 **Unique identifier for the case.** Suggested format: recording\_timecode (e.g. Housemates\_3211246). In the rare event that two cases begin simultaneously, use an additional symbol to distinguish them (e.g. Housemates\_3211246a, Housemates\_3211246b).

A03 **Is a child involved as either recruiter or recruitee?**

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

> Make this choice according to your understanding of the duration of childhood in this particular culture.2

Descriptions of nonverbal behavior should be concise and pitched at an appropriate level of granularity. For example, ((gestures at the salt)) is too general and ((raises arm and extends index finger toward the salt)) is too elaborate. Different projects will have different requirements for the description of nonverbal behavior and cases differ in complexity, but for the example above, ((points at salt)) is the right level of granularity for most purposes. Moreover, descriptions of nonverbal behavior should stick to what is visible at that particular moment. For example, ((stands and walks toward spices shelf)) is more objective than ((goes to get salt)) because at that moment it is still not certain how B's compliance with the recruitment will develop.

2 For different projects, different sociodemographic categories (based on age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.) may be flagged to allow for sorting or comparison (see, e.g., Stivers & Majid 2007). In this project, we decided to treat recruitments involving children separately to increase comparability among cultures and corpora.

### 2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

In this project, we decided not to record gaze behavior in the transcription of Move A's nonverbal component for reasons of economy, as there is a dedicated coding question about gaze (C16). However, we did record gaze in the transcript when it was used as a pointing gesture or "eye point" (Wilkins 2003) toward an object or location relevant to the recruitment, which made it easier to code this as a pointing gesture in question C02.

### **B. Recruitment categories**

This section contains questions designed to identify the main interactional "problem" or "point" of a recruitment sequence with reference to four categories, which were inductively derived from qualitative observation and analysis of recruitment episodes in our languages. This categorization serves multiple purposes, including grouping cases that share similar interactional contingencies, such as the visibility and accessibility of a target object (see questions E05, E06), and grouping cases in which Move A has a similar function, to test whether this has an effect on its form across languages.

In keeping with our recruitments approach, cases are assigned to categories primarily on the basis of B's response (see Chapter 1, §4). However, A's instigating behavior, along with any subsequent pursuits, should also be considered, especially in cases where B ignores it; here, the answer will reflect an understanding of what A's behavior is "going for" or working toward.

While it is possible to assign a case to more than one category, it is usually more useful to pick the most fitting or salient one. Also, while cases should be assigned to a category whenever possible, there will be cases that do not fit any of the categories but still fall within the broader definition of recruitment, for example, calling or motioning for a collective clinking of glasses, or initiating a joint recreational activity like playing chess.

Finally, a note on multiple cases belonging to the same recruitment sequence: when B responds to A's first attempt at recruitment (e.g. *I need a knife*) with repair initiation (e.g. *A knife?*) and A's subsequent action is constituted by a repair solution (e.g. *Yes*) followed by B's fulfillment (e.g. brings knife), questions B01- B04 should be answered in the same way across the two cases (the sequential position of cases is coded in C01). Example:

	- 1. yes
	- 2. no

"Giving an object" specifically refers to the physical transfer of a moveable object from the control of one person to another, usually released and grasped by the hands. This does not include cases in which B moves out of the way or otherwise facilitates A's taking possession of an object.

# B02 **Does B do a service for A in response to some behavior by A? Or, alternatively, was this the point of a sequence that went unfulfilled?**

A "service" is intended as a practical action involving some manipulation of the material environment (e.g. washing the dishes, feeding the chickens). While giving an object to someone can also be seen as a "service", it is a particular kind of service that is worth considering separately (see, e.g., questions E05, E06), so if you have answered "yes" to question B01, you should normally answer "no" to B02.

	- 1. yes
	- 2. no

"Altering" the trajectory of an ongoing behavior includes both adjusting or changing the behavior (doing the same thing in a different way) and ceasing the behavior altogether. These two kinds of alteration have different implications for how the recruitment sequence is fulfilled: doing something differently vs. not doing something anymore. Do not answer "yes" when the cessation of a behavior is incidental to performing a service or object transfer. Consider the following: if A says *Stop playing with your food and eat*, the cessation of eating is an integral part of the recruitment; however, if A says *Is there still some beer left?* and B stops watching the TV in order to go to the kitchen to get beer for A, the cessation of B's ongoing behavior is incidental to the recruitment.

2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

B04 **Does B do a practical action to address some current or anticipatable trouble for A?**

This question is aimed at capturing cases in which B provides assistance without this being solicited or expected by A, but rather instigated by A's display of current or anticipatable trouble (e.g. A arrives at a door with her hands full of heavy objects and B opens the door, or A grasps for the salt but is unable reach it so B pushes the salt closer).

### **C. Move A: The recruiting move**

### C01 **In the in-progress sequence, what is the position of Move A?**

Here we consider the sequential position of Move A, coding whether it is: the first and only attempt in a minimal sequence that is immediately completed ("one and only"), a first attempt in a longer sequence that is not completed in one go ("first of non-minimal"), a final attempt in a longer sequence ("last of non-minimal"), or a subsequent attempt that was neither the first nor the last ("*n*th"). When considering the sequential position of Move A, it is important to remember that certain preliminary moves, also referred to as "pre-requests" (see Levinson 1983: chap. 6; Rossi 2015), can function as recruiting moves on their own and lead to immediate completion.

```
Move A Are you using that pen? C01 = one and only
Move B ((passes A the pen))
```
However, preliminary moves may also be responded to with a go-ahead leading to a subsequent, more explicit Move A (or to multiple subsequent attempts).

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

> Other preliminary moves that cannot mobilize the relevant practical action in next position should not be considered as recruiting moves, though they are part of the recruitment episode. These typically involve generic presequences (Schegloff 2007: chap. 4):

*Only answer C02 if A06* ≠ *[not relevant] or [can't tell]*

# C02 **Concerning the nonverbal behavior, what does it consist of?**

These types of nonverbal behavior were derived from qualitative observation and analysis across languages, and were identified as recurrent relevant behaviors that either accompany verbal elements of the recruiting move or initiate recruitment on their own.

If multiple types of nonverbal behavior co-occur in the same recruiting move, answer this question based on the most salient behavior.

Pointing gestures include not only manual points, but also head points, lip points, and "eye points" (Wilkins 2003). As explained above in Section A, gaze should be considered here only when it is used to indicate an object or location relevant to the recruitment. Gaze used for recipient selection (Lerner 2003) is dealt with by question C16 and – in this project – is not be transcribed in A06.

*Only answer C03–C12 if A04* ≠ *[none] or [can't tell]*

### 2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

### C03 **Does the verbal behavior consist of a simple or complex construction?**

There are two main types of cases where verbal behavior should be coded as "complex":

### C04 **Does the verbal behavior include a directly-involved nominal referent?**

By "directly-involved nominal referent" we intend a referent that is the target object (e.g. *Water please*) or that is otherwise implicated in the recruited action (e.g. *Is the window open?* when the goal is to have B close the window). Such a referent may be encoded either with a full noun phrase (e.g. *Pass me the salt*) or with a pronominal element (e.g. *Pass me that*). Directly-involved nominal referents are easy to identify with most transitive predicates (e.g. *Clean the table*, *Light my cigarette*). With ditransitive (three-place) predicates, relevant referents will also include the "recipient" of the action (e.g. *Give it to Dad*, *Pass him* the lighter). Verbs such as *get* and *take* can also be treated as belonging to this group in that their semantics involves a location where an object is taken or gotten *from* (e.g. *Get it from the trolley*) (Fillmore 1977). Semantics aside, nominals can be directly involved in recruited actions in different ways and no single rule can capture all eventualities. But here are some examples that were collectively discussed during the project with an explanation of the rationale for the coding decision.

• *Sit on the chair*. Answer "yes" because A is telling B to sit specifically on the chair and not just anywhere (e.g. on the couch or floor); this referent is integral to the recruited action.

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

"Full noun phrases" typically involve open-class items referring to people, things, locations, whereas "pronominal" elements are reduced, closed-class pro-forms such as demonstratives and other deictics. For languages with the possibility of zero anaphora, if there is no overt pronominal form, stick to the surface and answer "no".

In the case of a complex verbal component (see question C03), consider it holistically; for example, a complex construction with multiple referents like *Get a pot from that cabinet and put it on the stove* should be coded as "yes, full noun phrase".

### C05 **What is the sentence type?**

In most languages, it is possible to distinguish different formal types of sentences that prototypically encode asserting or informing (declaratives), asking or questioning (interrogatives), and directing or ordering (imperatives) (Lyons 1977; Sadock & Zwicky 1985; König & Siemund 2007). These are formal, logico-semantic types that encode basic ways of dealing with propositional content. The criteria for assigning utterances to these three types may vary according to the internal organization of each language, but as a rule of thumb you can ask: how would this utterance be understood out of context? Some languages may have "other" major or minor sentence types (e.g. exclamatives, "insubordinated" *if* constructions, etc.). Since sentence type is based on there being a predicate, when Move A does not include a predicate (e.g. *Water please*), choose "there is no predicate".

*Only answer C06–C07 if C05* ≠ *"there is no predicate"*

### C06 **Is there a predicate that refers to the target action?**

This questions asks whether the action that is the projected outcome of the recruitment is explicitly referred to by a predicate in Move A. Examples:

*Only answer C07 if C05 = "interrogative", "declarative", or "other"*

C07gl **Does the predicate encode obligation, permission, ability, or volition to perform an act?**

This question is about specific modal categories: obligation/necessity (e.g. *You must finish your dinner*, *The door is to be shut*), permission/authorization (e.g. *May I have that last piece of cake?*), ability/possibility (e.g. *Can you pass me the salt?*, *You could start washing up*), volition/willingness (e.g. *I would like some water*, *Will you hand that to me please?*). These meanings must be semantically encoded. For example, a sentence like *You're standing on my foot*, although it may pragmatically oblige the recipient to step away, does not encode obligation. In English and other European languages, obligation, permission, ability, and volition are frequently encoded with modal

verbs such as *must*, *have to*, *need*, *may*, *can*, *will*. Other languages may use affixes or dedicated constructions. Cha'palaa, for example, encodes necessity with an infinitive verb followed by a finite 'be' verb.

*Only answer C08 if C05* ≠ *"imperative"*

C08 **Is the main subject overtly marked for person?**

"Overt grammatical person" refers to morphosyntactic and lexical categories in the language that encode the person of the subject-like argument of the verbal component, whether as a noun or noun phrase (e.g. *Grandma needs a blanket*), pronoun (e.g. *Can you pass the salt?*), clitic, verbal inflection (etc.), or a combination of these. This must be an overt, surface form. "Third person" refers to grammatical third person, regardless of whether the referent is a potential participant in the speech event (e.g. *Somebody should close the door*) or not (e.g. *The door should be closed*, *It's cold in here*).

Vocatives (e.g. *John, water please!*) do not constitute a form of person marking, but stand-alone pronouns do (e.g. *You, water!*). If you find overt grammatical subjects in your sample that bridge two or more of the categories listed above, code for the most specific person value that can be obtained from the construction, or choose "other" if you feel that none of the above choices apply.

	- 1. yes
	- 2. no
	- 3. can't tell

"Core constituents" refers to a predicate with its core arguments, which will normally be up to one argument with intransitive verbs (e.g. *You stop!*), up to two arguments with transitive verbs (e.g. *Can you close the door?*), and, in some languages, up to three arguments with ditransitive verbs (e.g. *You should give her a spoon*).  In the former case, the answer to this question is "no"; in the latter, it is "yes".

Additional elements beyond core grammatical constituents typically belong to one of the following four categories:

*Only answer C10–C11 if C09 = "yes"*

# C10 **Does the move include a clausal explanation?**

A "clausal explanation" makes reference to a past, present, or future state of affairs or event that provides grounds for the recruitment or makes it more intelligible to B. This covers any kind of reason-giving, including accounts for untoward or imposing behavior (e.g. *Stop talking so loudly, I have a headache*) as well as more general explanations that make the recruitment more understandable or clear (e.g. *Keep stirring the sauce so it doesn't get lumpy*).

The clausal explanation must be built into Move A (single package). If the explanation is provided after a self-contained Move A has been produced (two packages) then there are two main possibilities.

i. Participant A gives a reason after no uptake comes from B or when it is not clear that B will comply. In this case the explanation effectively counts as a second attempt at recruitment and must be entered as a separate case. Example:

ii. Participant A gives a reason for the recruitment after it has been already fulfilled by B, or after B has clearly shown that they are on their way to comply. We can define this as a "post-hoc" explanation, justifying the launch of the recruitment sequence after it has been complied with. Such explanations are not part of Move A. Example:

# C11gl **Does the move include a mitigating or strengthening element?**

This question asks about elements that mitigate or soften the recruiting move (e.g. *Move the car if it's not too much trouble*, *Can I have a little water?*) or, alternatively, that strengthen or aggravate it (e.g. *I would really like some water*, *Get the key right now*). These elements may be clauses, phrases, adverbs, particles, affixes, or other forms. Do not consider clausal explanations (C10) when answering this question.

# C12gl **Is there formal benefactive marking?**

This question asks if the verbal component includes an explicit beneficiary of the recruited action, which may be A (e.g. *Could you move that a little bit for me please?*, *Read me a book!*) or, alternatively, another participant or

combination of participants: B (e.g. *Will you pass the cards so I can cut them for you*?, *Grab yourself a beer!*), both A and B (e.g. *Can you set the table for everyone*?), or a third party C (e.g. *Get him a fork!*). Formal benefactive marking includes datives (e.g. *Read me a book!*), prepositional phrases (e.g. *Could you move that a little bit for me please?*) and other resources such as specific constructions (e.g. *Do me a favor and*…). Constructions with verbs of need (e.g. *I need a lighter*) do not qualify as including formal benefactive marking.

# C16 **Does A gaze at B during Move A?**

The purpose of this question is to code gaze as a design feature of the recruiting move. What is relevant is whether A is looking at, or trying to establish eye contact with, B. Answer "yes" on the basis of A's behavior regardless of whether B perceives being gazed at or not. If you have reasons to believe that B does not perceive being gazed at by A, it is recommended to flag this in the general notes field.

# **D. Move B and Move C: Responding and acknowledging**

The questions in this section concern the responding move or Move B, and the potential expansion of the sequence with an acknowledgment or Move C.

# D01 **What is the response doing relative to the recruitment?**

*"Quickly fulfills" versus "Plausibly starts fulfilling"*. It is useful to distinguish between two ways of positively responding to recruitment: doing

the target action within a short time frame immediately after Move A and doing something that could plausibly be construed as the beginning of fulfillment (but still possibly equivocal), over a longer time span. To make this decision, put yourself in the position of participant A and ask what he or she would be aware of in the first few seconds after Move A. Note that some recruited activities inherently take more time than others (e.g. setting the table for lunch, getting an object that is far away) and should always be coded as "plausibly starts fulfilling". Cases in which B commits to later fulfillment (e.g. *Oh sorry I'm busy right now but I'll do that in half an hour*) should also be coded as "plausibly starts fulfilling".

*"Rejects"*. All clearly negative responses such as refusing (e.g. *No I won't do that*) and/or giving an account for non-compliance (e.g. *I'm too busy now*) should be coded as "rejects". Different types of rejections are distinguished by subsequent questions (D02 and D03).

*"Initiates repair", "ignores", and "other"*. Besides responding positively or negatively, B may respond to the recruiting move in other ways. One possibility is to initiate repair. Another is to ignore the recruiting move by not taking it up at all. This applies both to cases in which B would be in a position to hear/see the recruiting move but intentionally ignores it and to cases in which B might not have heard/seen the recruiting move (for example, because they are involved in a parallel activity, or too far away, etc.). Other cases in which the recruiting move is taken up but the response does not fit any of the above categories should be coded as "other". Examples of "other" responses are:

# D02 **Does the response include a positive or negative polar element?**

Positive polar elements include verbal/vocal elements such as *yes*, *okay*, *sure*, *mm hm* as well as nonverbal elements like a head nod. Negative polar elements include verbal/vocal elements such as *no*, *mh mh* as well as nonverbal elements like a head shake. Coding should take into account that linguistic systems differ. For example, in some languages like Mandarin and Cha'palaa, one way to do a polar response is by repeating the verb.

*Only answer D03 if A07* ≠ *[none] or [can't tell]*

# D03 **Does the response include a clausal explanation/account?**

See notes for question C10 on explanations and accounts.

# D04gl **Is there acknowledgment by A?**

"Acknowledgment" includes thanking (e.g. *Gracias!*), other expressions of gratitude (e.g. *Cheers, I appreciate it, Oh I'm so glad you can do this for me*), and more generally any positive conveyance of appreciation or satisfaction by the recruiter immediately after receiving a response indicating fulfillment. In some cases, fulfillment may be still ongoing or forthcoming at the time of the acknowledgment.

*Only answer D05–D06 if D04 = "yes"*

D05 **Transcribe and translate the acknowledgment** (*Muchas gracias* 'Thanks a lot'). If the acknowledgment includes nonverbal behavior, briefly describe it, e.g. ((nods repeatedly)).

# D06gl **Is there a subsequent move by B responding to the acknowledgment?**

Such a response may be conventionalized (e.g. *You're welcome*) or not (e.g. *Oh well I owed you this one*).

*Only answer D07 if D06 = "yes"*

D07 **Transcribe and translate the subsequent move by B responding to the acknowledgment.**

# **E. Other elements of the recruitment sequence**

The questions in this section code for other elements of the recruitment sequence beyond Moves A, B, C.

### E01 **Is there an evident local immediate beneficiary for the recruitment?**

The answer to this question is in principle independent of, and possibly incongruous with, the answer given to question C12 (which deals with *formal marking* of beneficiaries). E01 can be a tricky question, but try not to overthink the issue and choose the most straightforward answer. If in doubt, be conservative and answer "no".

# E02 **Is the interaction dyadic?**

For the answer to be "yes", there should normally be only two people in the video recording at the time at which the recruitment occurs; if there are three or more people, answer "no". In some cases, a stretch of interaction may be considered dyadic even though other people are present in the immediate vicinity but are clearly not part of the interaction.

### E03 **Is a vocative used?**

Vocatives normally involve a proper name, kin term, title, or similar, and provide a way of explicitly addressing the recruiting move to a specific recipient or set of recipients. The vocative may be built into Move A (e.g. *Can you pass me the knife John*?, *You two guys*,*come with me*) or be part of a summons-answer sequence that precedes the recruiting move (see also C01):

Summons *Hey Bob*! E03 = yes Answer *What?* Move A *Come here* Move B ((goes to A))

### E04 **Can A and B's relationship be characterized as socially asymmetrical?**

In this question we code for any salient social asymmetry between A and B, based on the researcher's knowledge of the society. The question refers to enduring asymmetries between A and B that hold across contexts. Social asymmetries can be based on age (e.g. older-younger siblings) as well as other kinds of social status (e.g. authority roles such as husband-wife, parent-child). The answer should be based on prescriptive norms and general cultural expectations of the community, not on the instantiation of the relationship in the recruitment sequence, so you should not use the recruitment sequence as a basis for your judgment: evidence for the asymmetry must be independent of it. Social asymmetry is gradient, so judge whether a dyad is *relatively* symmetrical or asymmetrical.

*Only answer E05–E06 if B01 = "yes"*

### E05 **Is the target object visible to A?**

### E06 **Does B have better access to the object in question than A?**

Typically, B is "using an object" when he or she is currently manipulating it. Cases in which B has been making use of the object all along and has only momentarily rested it somewhere when the recruitment is attempted should be coded as "yes, B is in possession of the object but is not using it". Possession does not require that B be the legal or socially recognized owner of the object; it applies to all cases where B has the object "on them" (e.g. in their pocket) as well as to cases where the object is enclosed into another possession of B's (e.g. their bag). For cases where relative closeness is relevant, try not to overthink the issue and answer "yes" only when there is a clear difference in distance (e.g. the object is within B's reach and visibly far from A).

*Only answer E07 if B02 = "yes"*

### E07 **Is B in charge of, or especially responsible for, the service in question?**

Only choose "yes" if the answer is clear. The kind of responsibility implied cannot be just a matter of proximity or availability, but must be linked to an individual and his or her social role, or derived from a previous agreement to do the action (preferably documented in the recording). As an example of the former, in Chachi society young girls are expected to bring water from the river to the house, and are more responsible for this task than males and people of other ages. As an example of the latter, in one case in the Italian corpus a woman agreed to add stock cubes to a soup but was then distracted and did not do it; fifteen minutes later, she was told to do the task. As with other questions, if you are unsure, be conservative and answer "no".

2 A coding scheme for recruitment sequences in interaction

# **Acknowledgments**

This coding scheme has benefited from the sustained input of all project contributors – Julija Baranova, Joe Blythe, Mark Dingemanse, N. J. Enfield, Simeon Floyd, Kobin H. Kendrick, Giovanni Rossi, Jörg Zinken – and of other participants and conceptual collaborators in data analysis and discussion – Tyko Dirksmeyer, Paul Drew, Rósa S. Gísladóttir, Steve Levinson, Elizabeth Manrique.

# **References**

Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield

# **Chapter 3**

# **Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador**

# Simeon Floyd

Department of Anthropology, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Cha'palaa use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Cha'palaa, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). The present chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of the Cha'palaa language with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.

# **1 Introduction**

This paper offers a first description of one area of everyday interaction among speakers of the indigenous Cha'palaa language of Ecuador, sequences in which one party "recruits" the behavior of another for some practical action such as transferring an object or physically assisting with or collaborating in an activity. The analysis of these instances is based on a video corpus of informal conversation recorded in the Chachi communities where Cha'palaa is spoken. This area of Cha'palaa interaction is characterized by a tendency toward direct recruiting

Simeon Floyd. Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador. In Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N. J. Enfield (eds.), *Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments*, 51–92. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4018374

### Simeon Floyd

moves, employing an extensive set of imperative formats, within the contexts of the different rights and responsibilities of individuals in Chachi society.

# **1.1 The Cha'palaa Language**

The Cha'palaa language is spoken by the Chachi people in small communities and homesteads along the rivers of the Ecuadorian Province of Esmeraldas between the Andean foothills and the Pacific coast. It is one of the modern members of the Barbacoan family, which was once the dominant language family of the region corresponding to northern Ecuador and southern Colombia until it was displaced by Quechuan languages and, later, Spanish, in much of the Andean highlands. The Chachi people avoided the pressure of language shift by migrating to the coastal lowlands where they live today (Jijón y Caama 1914; DeBoer 1996; Floyd 2010). Estimates of the number of speakers vary between about 6,000 (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos 2010) and 10,000 in Ethnologue (Lewis et al. 2014).

Until recently, Cha'palaa was a relatively unstudied language, with only a few descriptive sources by missionary linguists produced over the last few decades (Moore 1962; Lindskoog & Lindskoog 1964; Vittadello 1988); recent work by the author has begun to bring more aspects of the language and the interactive practices of its speakers to light (Floyd 2009; 2010; 2014a,b; 2015; 2016; 2018; Floyd & Bruil 2011; Dingemanse & Floyd 2014; Floyd & Norcliffe 2016; Dingemanse et al. 2017). Like many South American languages, Cha'palaa has a basic SOV word order with extensive agglutinating verbal morphology. Some of its grammatical features that are relevant for recruiting practices include its large imperative paradigm, its egophoric system (a distinctive type of epistemic marking), its complex predicate system, its morphological case markers, and other elements that will be described in the sections that follow.

# **1.2 Data collection and corpus**

The video corpus on which this work is based was constructed in accordance with a set of guidelines developed by and for the members of the comparative project being reported on in this volume (see Chapters 1–2). The corpora studied in this project feature informal conversation among friends and family, and participants received no special instructions other than to talk or go about their daily activities as they wished.

The Cha'palaa corpus was recorded by the author over a period between 2007 and 2015 in household and village settings in Chachi communities of north-west-

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

ern Ecuador. The majority of the recordings come from the Rio Cayapas area, particularly from its tributary the Rio Zapallo, and a few come from other areas. In most cases the camera was placed in a household or common area during regular daily activities and then retrieved after about an hour. All videos included adult participants (adolescents or older), including dyads and larger groups of family members and friends, sometimes changing configuration during filming, with children often coming and going. Participants were involved in cooking, eating, doing other household tasks, making handcrafts such as woven baskets, or simply relaxing and conversing.

The data considered for analysis consists of a sample of selections from the recordings (see Chapter 2, §4). The goal was to identify at least 200 recruitment sequences among adults. The nature of the Cha'palaa corpus, made up primarily of recordings in multi-generational households, meant that there were many cases in which one or both of the involved participants was a small child (not yet adolescent, below about 12 years). These were excluded from the present comparison in order not to introduce complicating issues of language development. Excluding these cases, which were twice as frequent as adult-only cases, necessitated reviewing a large sample of about 9.5 hours from 16 different recordings to reach a total of 205 cases (out of the initial 653, with 448 child-involved cases that were excluded). Excerpts from this sample of cases are presented below to illustrate the range of linguistic forms and practices that make up the Cha'palaa recruitment system.

# **2 Basics of recruitment sequences**

As defined in Chapter 1, §4, a recruitment is a basic cooperative phenomenon in social interaction consisting of a sequence of two moves with the following characteristics:

In general, "practical" actions in Move B (M-B) were considered to be goaldriven bodily movements or manipulations of the physical environment, and contrast with states of rest and inactivity. Such practical actions can often be thought of as "target" actions of participant A, when they are made explicit in

### Simeon Floyd

Move A (M-A). Also, participant A may often be a beneficiary of the recruited action, but in other cases both A and B together, and sometimes even mostly B, may benefit from the outcomes of the recruitment sequence. Further details relevant for this definition, including what happens when Move B rejects the recruitment, or when there is no response, will be discussed in §4. The next subsections give some basic examples of recruitment sequences. In the transcripts, ▶ and ▷ designate Move A and Move B, respectively.

# **2.1 Minimal recruitment sequence**

Extract 1 provides an example of a minimal recruitment sequence in Cha'palaa. In Move A, participant A turns to look at participant B, his wife, and uses an interrogative format to invoke a specific target action: 'did you sweep? did you sweep?'. As part of his recruiting move, he also adds a reason for doing this action: 'the child is in all that trash'. Participant B's reaction is to walk off camera and to return shortly with a broom, sweeping the spot indicated by participant A.

(1) CHSF2011\_01\_11S2\_1531121

```
▶ 1 a mankashyu mankashyu
          ma -n -kash -yu ma -n -kash -yu
          again-IPFV-sweep-EGO again-IPFV-sweep-EGO
          did you sweep? did you sweep?
  2 na tsamantsa ujtu'paatala
          na tsamantsa ujtu'-pala -tala
          small very.much trash-place-among
          the child is in all that trash
▷ 3 b ((leaves))
  4 (15.0)
▷ 5 b ((returns with broom, sweeps))
```
The format selected by A in line 1 illustrates how a distinctive feature of Cha'palaa's grammar, an "egophoric marker" (Floyd, Norcliffe & San Roque 2018; also referred to as "conjunct-disjunct" markers, see Hale 1980; DeLancey 1992; Bickel 2000; Creissels 2008; Dickinson 2000; Post 2013) is employed for the interactive function of instigating a behavior on the part of B. This type of knowledge-based morphology used in this context treats the addressee as the locus of knowledge (in statements the marker might associate with the speaker's perspective in a similar way). While this is a distinctive morphological resource of Cha'palaa, its usage for recruitment also fits a more general pattern of question-like formats. Looking at Move B, the uptake by B provides evidence that functionally this

3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

question was taken as a request for the provision of a service, namely, sweeping up.

# **2.2 Extended recruitment sequence**

In the simplest sequences, B takes steps to accomplish the target action in Move B immediately after A produces Move A, but this does not always occur. Recruitment sequences sometimes feature more than one recruiting move; these cases may be "pursuits", in which A repeats a version of the recruiting move (Pomerantz 1984; Bolden et al. 2012) or other types of sequences in which the response to Move A comes later, such as in repair sequences like that seen in (2). Participant A, a woman who is washing her clothes on the shore, asks her friend participant B for a plastic tub, but before she passes it to A, B requests a clarifying confirmation of the target object, in line 2. After A provides this confirmation, B accomplishes the target action.

(2) CHSF\_2012\_08\_04S4\_1712020

```
▶ 1 a Daira ñaa inu tina ka' eede
          Daira ñu -ya i -nu tina ka -tu ere -de
          Daira 2SG-FOC 1SG-ACC tub grab-SR pass-IMP
          Daira you pass me the tub
▷ 2 b enstaa? ((pointing at tub))
          ensta-a
          this-Q
          this one?
▶ 3 a jee tsadekee
          jee tsa-de-ke-e
          yes SEM-PL-do-IMP
          yeah do that
▷ 4 b ((throws tub to A))
```
In these types of non-minimal sequences it is possible to observe "side sequences" (Jefferson 1972), "insert sequences" (Schegloff 2007: chap. 6), and other types of intervening interaction that may occur between the original Move A and the fulfillment of the recruitment. When the request is not fulfilled in the first Move B, this can generate further iterations of the M-A/M-B structure until the sequence is completed (or abandoned).

# **2.3 Subtypes of recruitment sequence**

Despite considerable overlap, the concept of recruitment is intended to capture a broader range of phenomena than terms like "request" or "directive" (see Chapter 1, §4). Four broad subtypes of sequence are further identified as a way to cat-

### Simeon Floyd

egorize and analyze cases. These categories distinguish cases in which the target action of M-A is best thought of as (i) the provision of a service, (ii) the transfer of an object, (iii) the alteration of some ongoing trajectory of behavior, or (iv) if there was no clear M-A and participant B stepped in to provide assistance in response to A's current or anticipatable trouble. This last category is not a request in that there is no on-record solicitation of a response, but is a recruitment in that practical assistance is instigated by A's visible trouble. The term "on-record" here refers to identifiable moves in social interaction that ask for or otherwise overtly signal the need for a target action; categories (i), (ii) and (iii) were required to be on-record in this sense, while (iv) was not.

Table 1: Relative frequencies of recruitment sequence subtypes in the Cha'palaa sample (*n*=205).

Extracts1 and 2 have already provided examples of the two most frequently occurring categories; in (1) participant A requests the provision of a service, sweeping the floor, and in (2) participant A asks for an object, a plastic tub. Extract 3 shows an example of an alteration of a trajectory of action: A notices that B is sitting in such a way that she appears uncomfortable, and tells her to alter the way she is currently sitting to a more restful position, giving the reason that otherwise her back will hurt. This example also helps us illustrate how benefit may be differently distributed in recruitment sequences as here the primary beneficiary is the recruitee herself.

(3) CHSF2011\_06\_25S2\_3916900

```
▶ 1 a leka leka leka beenbushu kiya
          rest rest rest back hurt
          rest rest rest, (your) back will hurt
```

```
▷ 2 b ((reclines))
```
As illustrated in Table 1, alterations of trajectory were the least frequent of the sequence types in the Cha'palaa sample. Preliminary analysis of the cases involving children – excluded from the comparative data set, as mentioned above

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

in §1.2 – show many more attempts to alter and correct behavior in those cases, suggesting that social status may play a role, and that adults may try to avoid such potentially face-threatening interactions among each other, while in similar interactions with children such recruitments may be the norm. Future work with child-involved cases stands to shed more light on these issues.

The last subtype of case that was included in the sample were sequences in which B steps in to assist A with some problem that, while usually evident from the context, has not been explicitly formulated by A. For example, in (4), B and several boys were sitting in front of the kitchen door, scraping and eating coconut shavings. When A begins to approach with a heavy load of bananas, B and the others first gaze at her and then proceed to move the bowls, stools, and other objects out of her way, and to lean to the side to allow her to pass into the kitchen more easily (Figure 1).

While in these types of cases there is no on-record M-A by A, the types of services and objects that B provides in such cases are the same types of local practical actions that are explicitly asked for in other instances (e.g. 'Move over so I can pass', etc.).

# **3 Move A: The recruiting move**

The formats used by participant A in M-A could be fully nonverbal, fully verbal, or a composite of verbal and nonverbal elements. This section describes the composition of M-A in both the visual and the spoken channels.

# **3.1 Fully nonverbal recruiting moves**

Most of the recruiting formats in the Cha'palaa sample included spoken elements; of the 205 cases sampled, only nine were fully nonverbal in M-A (excluding cases of trouble assistance, see §2.3). An example of a fully nonverbal case is shown in (5), in which A and B are taking care of an injured chick together. During a moment when no spoken conversation is ongoing, A holds out the chick for B to hold for a moment so A can free his hands to manipulate some thread. B responds to A holding the chick out by reaching up to take it (Figure 2).

(b) Participant B and children see participant A approaching and move the bowl and stool out of her way (line 2).

(c) Participant B and children lean out of the way as participant A passes with her load of bananas (line 2).

Figure 1: Frames from Extract 4. Family members facilitate a woman's arrival with a large load of plantains that she needs to deposit in the kitchen.

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

Figure 2: Participant A holds out his hand and participant B hands the chick to him.

The main formats for nonverbal requests in the sample were holding out objects, as in (5), and reaching out to receive objects. These were also two of the major nonverbal formats seen accompanying verbal recruiting formats, the topic of the next section.

# **3.2 Nonverbal behavior in composite recruiting moves**

In most Cha'palaa recruitment cases M-A includes no nonverbal behavior that is salient or relevant for the sequence; instead, target actions or other elements are expressed verbally. However, in 55 of 205 cases some relevant nonverbal behavior occurred. As mentioned in the previous section, nine of these were independent nonverbal recruiting moves, but the other 46 were composites including verbal and nonverbal elements. While some nonverbal behavior was idiosyncratic and did not lend itself to categorization, several well-defined types of practices made up the majority of the nonverbal elements for Cha'palaa. In Cha'palaa three practices accounted for about 85% of all nonverbal behavior seen in recruiting moves (see Table 2). Pointing was the most common of these, accounting for 42% of nonverbal elements. Pointing gestures usually indicated an object, location, or person that was relevant for the recruitment in some way. The

### Simeon Floyd

next-most-common practice was holding out an object that is instrumentally involved in the recruitment, typically to be taken by B to do something with, as seen in (5), above. The other major practice in the sample was reaching out to receive an object. In addition, there was one instance of iconic-symbolic gesture (beckoning for B to approach A), and about 15% were heterogeneous practices that did not fit into any of the cross-linguistic coding categories applied in the comparative project.

Table 2: Types of nonverbal practices in recruiting moves (*n*=55).

Figure 3 shows a pointing gesture that accompanied the spoken recruiting turn 'give me the string there' (full sequence shown in Extract 10). Along with his indexical point, participant A also uses lip pointing, a practice observed commonly among Cha'palaa speakers (Dingemanse & Floyd 2014) and in many other languages (Sherzer 1973; Enfield 2001).

Figure 3: Screenshot from Extract 10; index finger and lip pointing as part of Move A.

In some cases the nonverbal behavior was relatively complex, as in (6) below, in which A first extends his arm and points at the menthol ointment he is re-

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

questing (Figure 4), saying 'give me that also' and, after a brief pause, providing a reason for the request ('I will smell a little') as he turns his palm upwards to receive the object. One interesting element of the nonverbal behavior in this case is that A has already extended his arm by the first part of M-A, suggesting that he has high expectations that the request will be fulfilled, possibly based on it being a relatively "low contingency" request (Curl & Drew 2008; Craven & Potter 2010).

### (6) CHSF2011\_01\_11S3\_2692960

Figure 4: A (center left) reaches out while requesting the menthol (in line 1).

In Cha'palaa, these three practices of pointing, holding out objects, and reaching to receive object made up more that 80% of the total nonverbal behavior seen in recruiting moves (see Table 2).1 However, there is an asymmetry between M-A and M-B in recruitment sequences in that while M-B tends to involve nonverbal elements, especially the accomplishment of the target action, more than two thirds of M-As were in the verbal channel (71%, *n*=146/205), with only 29% of

1These are practices with deep roots, being among the first to appear developmentally (Masur 1983; Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2015).

### Simeon Floyd

M-As including nonverbal elements (*n*=59/205).2 The next sections describe the verbal recruiting formats.

# **3.3 Verbal elements: construction types and subtypes**

The spoken elements of M-A are mainly made up of the morphosyntactic resources of the Cha'palaa language (sometimes also with elements of Spanish, as the primary local second language). Verbal elements were classified according to cross-linguistic syntactic categories of declarative, interrogative, imperative (see König & Siemund 2007), as well as cases of "no predicate", and "other" cases for predicates that do not fit well with any of the main categories (see Chapter 2, §6). Not all languages distinguish among sentence types in the same way, but in most cases Cha'palaa features very clear and unambiguous morphological distinctions on the verb associated with the three major sentence types (more on this below). As for frequency, imperatives outnumber the others considerably.

Table 3: Construction type of recruiting moves including spoken elements (*n*=192).

### **3.3.1 No predicate**

Reviewing all of the different morphosyntactic types and their functions, we can start with cases in which there was no predicate, which belong to no sentence type in a strict sense. These cases can be classified by a few simple categories: of the 22 cases without a predicate, 12 name an object to be transferred, 6 name places that were relevant for the target action, 3 are vocatives selecting the recipient, and one was an interjection. Because the last two categories do not specify any element of the recruited action, they generally occur as a second attempt

2Note, however, that of the 146 cases involving language, in 38 the presence or absence of nonverbal elements could not be ascertained due to the recruiter being off camera or with visual access impeded by another participant.

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

to a previous recruiting move that was not successful (see also Kendrick, Chapter 4, §4.2.4). The other formats can generally function as independent recruiting moves as well as subsequent attempts. For example, speakers can name destinations as a way to tell addresses to go to those places or take things to or from those places. Sometimes other grammatical resources come into play, like the locative case marker with the first-person pronoun in (7) that specifies that the addressee should do something to or for participant A. Object naming usually functions to request the object in question, sometimes with additional material like in M-A of (7), which also specifies a recipient, but which leaves the target action of giving or passing up to the recipient's inference. While unspecified, the requested action is usually obvious from the context, and so this type of recruiting practice can be considered relatively explicit or on-record (on "namings" see also Rossi 2015b: chap. 2).

Also worth noting here is that, in M-B, participant B acts towards the fulfillment of the target action, but she does so in a particular way: by delegating to a third party (see also Enfield, Chapter 6, §6; Blythe, Chapter 7, §4.2.2). This was a strategy sometimes observed when the target action was obviously easier for a third party, for example when they were closer to a target object, or of lower social status, both of which were the case for participant C in (7).3

(7) CHSF2012\_08\_04S4\_1524500

```
▶ 1 a inu jabon ((in water, points at soap on shore))
          i -nu jabon
          1SG-ACC soap
          to me, soap
▷ 2 b jabon tya'kide apa ñaa
          jabon tyatyu-ki-de apa ñu-ya
          soap throw -do-IMP father 2SG-FOC
          throw the soap, son, you
  3 ((points at soap))
  4 c ((child throws soap to A))
```
Aside from the 22 cases of M-A without a predicate, all other cases with verbal material in M-A included a predicate of some kind.

3A note on the translation of *apa* in (7), line 2: in Cha'palaa it is common to use affectionate vocatives that are the equivalent of "mommy" and "daddy" for small male and female children; the result is difficult to translate to English.

### Simeon Floyd

### **3.3.2 Imperatives**

In contrast with the more context-dependent cases without predicates, most of the time speakers gave more information about the target action by producing a predicate (89% of recruitments with spoken M-A). Of these, as noted in Table 3, imperative forms were by far the most frequent type of predicates seen in recruiting moves. The imperative sentence type in Cha'palaa does not consist of a single construction, but instead features several options (see also Enfield, Chapter 6, §4.3.1). Cross-linguistically, imperative verb forms tend to be relatively short, frequently consisting of just a verb root or a root with a minimal marker (Khrakovskij 2001; Aikhenvald 2010). Cha'palaa fits this pattern; its two main imperative constructions are a bare verb root or a suffix, *-de*, seen in line 2 of (7) above. Table 4 summarizes the different imperative formats observed in the sample.

Table 4: The Cha'palaa imperative paradigm, singular and plural forms (optionally marked for plural), and percentages of each format within the total of imperatives in the sample (*n*=137).

The bare root option is shown in (8). In a few limited contexts, declaratives can also occur as bare verb roots, so the comparable imperative format relies to a small degree on context for disambiguation. Cha'palaa has a system of complex predicates in which multiple roots combine in single predicates, where one of the roots, usually one of a set of verb classifiers, occurs farthest to the right, and takes the finite morphology (Floyd 2014a; see also Dickinson 2000 for a description of a similar system in a related language, Tsafiki). In most cases finite predicates take at least one verbal morpheme, but one of the options for forming imperatives is to use just the verb root. In (8) participant A takes this option, telling B to look at a magazine she is passing to her.

3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

(8) CHSF2011\_06\_24S3\_1304600

```
▶ 1 a lenke' kerake ((hands B magazine))
          len -ke-tu kera-ke
          read-do-SR see -do
          read this
```
▷ 2 b ((takes magazine and reads))

In addition to the two most frequent imperative formats shown above in (7), line 2, and (8), Cha'palaa has three further imperative markers, plus distinct plural forms of each. Table 4 shows each of the formats' frequencies relative to the other imperative options in the sample. The bare verb form sometimes occurs with a lengthened vowel and a related shift in primary stress to the right, which might be considered a kind of strengthener (see §3.4). The next most-frequent format is the general imperative *-de*, which conveys an on-record wish that the addressee do the target action, and a speaker-directed imperative *-ka* that conveys that the speaker is the indirect object and beneficiary. Then there are two hortative forms for groups that the speaker includes him or herself in, one for stronger, "command" types of recruiting moves (*-da*), and one for weaker, "suggestion" types of recruiting moves (*sa*). This final polite option did not occur in the sample, perhaps in connection with the maximally informal nature of the recordings, which may lead more formal, delicate types of recruiting practices to be infrequent.

When using an imperative, it is possible to mark a beneficiary of three-place predicates like 'give' with a full noun phrase, as in (9).

(9) CHSF2011\_02\_14S3\_2673050

▶ 1 a inu jayu kude aamama shipijcha ((reaches towards B)) i -nu jayu ku -de aamama shipijcha 1SG-ACC a.little give-IMP grandma 'madroña' give me a little madroña grandma

```
▷ 2 b ((turns towards A, begins passing fruit))
```
There is also a special imperative marker that is only compatible with firstperson beneficiaries, *-ka*, illustrated in (10), line 3.

(10) CHSF2012\_01\_20S6\_2952739

1 a vieja old lady 2 b aa

huh?

### Simeon Floyd

▶ 3 a inu chuwa manka' kuka junu jee ((finger and lip point)) i -nu chuwa ma -n -ka -tu ku -ka junu jee 1SG-ACC vine again-IMFV-grab-SR give-IMP1 there yes give me the string there hey

```
▷ 4 b ((brings string))
```
When the speaker is included as a participant in the target action along with the interlocutor, one of two different hortatives may be used. The first, *-da*, was the only one of the two attested in the sample, indicating that it is probably used more frequently in general in informal contexts. Extract 11 shows a case of this hortative, when one teenager attempts to recruit another to go fishing. The sequence was unsuccessful and was abandoned when A did not respond to B after line 4.

### (11) CHSF2011\_02\_14S3\_3479997

Outside of the sample, looking into the video corpus more broadly, it was possible to find examples of the second hortative, *-sa*. This marker is identical to a dependent clause marker for modal complements, and it is likely that the hortative use developed through processes of "insubordination" (Evans 2007; Floyd 2016; Evans & Watanabe 2016) when the dependent clause developed a conventionalized main clause usage, and became incorporated into the imperative paradigm. It alternates with *-da* as a more "mitigating" option. At present it is so integrated into the imperative system that it takes the plural marker that only combines with imperative forms, *-i*. Extract 12 shows an example of the plural form of *-sa*.

(12) CHSF2012\_01\_07S1\_137560

```
▶ 1 a jisai lalaa
          ji-sai lala-ya
          go-HORT2.PL 1PL -FOC
          let's go
```
### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

▷ 2 b ((leaves house with A))

Note that, at a finer level of categorization, the social actions in (11) and (12) may be also analyzed as "proposals" (Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Stivers & Sidnell 2016). These fall within the phenomenon of recruitment, which broadly encompasses sequences in which A obtains B's assistance or collaboration in doing something for or with them (see Chapter 1, §4).

The imperative system is flexible with respect to grammatical norms, plural marking is available but optional, and the motivations of speakers for choosing one of the three second-person imperatives or one of the two hortatives will require further research to be fully determined. This first analysis shows that such grammatical flexibility provides diverse options for different interactional contingencies.

### **3.3.3 Interrogatives**

While imperatives usually function as unambiguous on-record recruiting moves, the other two main sentence types, interrogatives and declaratives provide ways for instigating a fitted response to the recruiting move without going explicitly on-record, and have been discussed with respect to indirectness in speech acts (Searle 1969). Interrogatives often inquire about preconditions for the request (Levinson 1983), potentially launching a "pre-sequence" (Schegloff 1980; 2007; Rossi 2015a), but conventional use of interrogative formats for pre-requesting can result in the "collapse" of the pre-sequence to the point that interrogatives can act as independent request formats (Levinson 1983; Fox 2015). This is the case with the format seen in line 1 of (13), which inquires about the availability of an object ('is your saw not there?'), but which ends up being taken as a request for the object.

(13) CHSF2012\_01\_21S3\_2615530

is (your) saw not there?

```
▶ 1 a ñuchi serruchu tsutyuu ((off camera, outside of house))
          ñu -chi serruchu tsu-tyu-u
          2SG-POSS saw lie-NEG-Q
          is your saw not there?
  2 b aa
          huh?
  3 a serruchu tsutyuu
          serruchu tsu-tyu-u
          saw lie-NEG-Q
```
### Simeon Floyd

```
4 b enku (.) tanami ibain (.)
          en -ku ta -na -mi i -bain
          here-LOC have-be.in.POS-DECL 1SG-also
          also here, I have it (.)
  5 jayaa finberaya
          jayu -ya fi -n -bera -ya
          little.bit-FOC eat-PFV-still-FOC
          it 'eats' a little (it saws decently)
  6 seruchu tii ((to C))
          serruchu ti -i
          saw say-Q
          did (he) say 'saw'?
  7 c mm
          yeah
  8 b ((goes to get saw, returns))
▷ 9 Ebe jee ((holds out saw))
          Ebe hey
          here Ebe
```
Going through the interaction above line-by-line helps to illustrate how a question about the presence of an object is treated by the participants as a request for the object. In line 1 A inquires about the saw, using the verb 'lie', which is the appropriate positional verb for elongated objects on flat surfaces. Possibly because A is standing outside the house and did not have B's full attention, B displays some trouble hearing line 1 and initiates repair in line 2, occasioning a full repetition in line 3 (typical for an "open" repair initiator Drew 1997; see Floyd 2015 for a description of the Cha'palaa repair system). In line 4, B answers the question, confirming that the saw does in fact exist. But this is not all he does; in line 5 he also gives some information about the status of the object with respect to its function ('it saws decently'), giving evidence that he understands that lines 1 and 3 are geared towards getting the saw. Interestingly, B has chosen to respond to A even though he appears not to be fully certain of the target action, as in line 5 he requests further confirmation from his wife C. After this, B proceeds to fulfill the request in 8, but at no point has A overtly asked to be given the saw.

Interrogative formats like that seen above in (13) are frequent in cases of requests for transfers of objects: compare 7% of interrogative recruiting moves in the total sample (*n*=13/192) with 21% for object transfers (*n*=9/42). Additionally, if the object is not visible, interrogatives are used in 47% of cases (*n*=8/17); this is to be expected, because these are canonical contexts in which a participant might check the preconditions for a request before making it, thus avoiding rejection on the grounds of a faulty presupposition that the object was available (see also Rossi, Chapter 5, §3.3.3).

In other situations, other interrogative formats can be used. In cases of requests

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

for the provision of services, for example, a speaker might ask a question about a target action to convey that they would like an addressee to do this action. An example of this was seen in (1) with the question 'did/do you sweep?'. The common feature of all the different types of interrogative formats is that, each in different ways, they use what is on the surface a request for information as a way to request an activity.

### **3.3.4 Declaratives**

Declaratives are another format for less direct or off-record requests. These work by introducing a proposition about some state of affairs, but with an implicit understanding that some action should be taken by an addressee. Relative to imperatives, this format allows speakers to avoid overtly selecting an addressee for the recruitment. In some cases the addressee may be obvious from the context – if A is gazing directly at B, for instance (see Lerner 2003), or if the interaction is dyadic – while in other cases participants might self-select and construe themselves as the addressee. One cross-linguistically common format for declarative recruiting moves is deontic statements about how things should be, or what things need to be done (see also Rossi, Chapter 5, §3.3.4; Zinken, Chapter 8, §3.3.2; Baranova, Chapter 9, §3.3.3). Extract 14 provides one such example of a deontic construction in Cha'palaa, which is formed with the combination of an infinitive verb and a copula (a very common deontic construction type in South America, Müller 2013). In this case a husband A and wife B were working together to nail in some boards to repair a wall, and when A makes a statement about the task that should be done, B responds by altering the way in which she is performing the task.

(14) CHSF201

▶ 1 a tu- tu'pushujuntsaa kanu juaa tu- tu'pu-shujunsta-ya ka -nu ju-ya nail nail -REL.CL -FOC grab-INF be-FOC (one) must grab the part that was nailed

▷ 2 b ((grabs and moves board))

Research on some European languages has shown similar usages of deontic constructions (Zinken & Ogiermann 2011; Couper-Kuhlen & Etelämäki 2015; Rossi & Zinken 2016), suggesting that this particular strategy may be cross-linguistically recurrent. Apart from the specific deontic constructions seen above, a further wide range of declarative construction types can function as recruiting moves in the right contexts. For example, (15) gives us a case of a pursuit

### Simeon Floyd

of a recruitment that was not fulfilled after the first attempt, which was an imperative: 'look for lice on me'. While a bit taboo in Western cultures, picking parasites of each other is an important social interactive practice among peoples from different parts of the world, including the Chachis of Ecuador, for whom it is considered an affectionate form of behavior most common among family members. In this case, however, when A tells her husband B to groom her in this way, he displays no uptake, and continues a parallel line of conversation, leading to a second attempt by B in line 3, this time in a declarative format.

### (15) CHSF2012\_08\_04S4\_1524500

```
▶ 1 a inu mu keraa ((sits with back towards B))
          i -nu mu kera-a
          1SG-ACC lice look-IMP
          look for lice on me
  2 b ((no uptake, 88.0 unrelated conversation))
▶ 3 a ñaa inu mu keetyunkayu mm mm ((scratches head))
          ñu-ya i -nu mu kee-tyu-nkayu mm mm
          2 -FOC 1SG-ACC louse see-NEG-EV mm mm
```

```
you aren't looking for lice on me, hey
```
Participant A had been sitting with her back to her husband, giving him access to her hair for over a minute when she makes a second attempt at recruitment (line 3). This time she uses a declarative format, using a negation construction to call attention to a state of affairs that is not currently the case ('you aren't looking for lice'). Similar "negative observations" have been shown to be a format for complaining (Schegloff 1988; Rossi 2018). In light of the first, more overt recruiting move in line 1, this statement can be taken as a request that B do the relevant action.

### **3.3.5 Other construction types**

In addition to specific verbal morphemes, there are specialized verbal constructions that can be resources for initiating recruitment. One good example of this is a benefactive construction using the verb 'give' as an auxiliary to indicate beneficiaries, a construction which appears in several other unrelated local languages and may be a product of areal convergence (see Bruil 2008 on Ecuadorian Spanish and Quechua). While this construction literally asks one to 'give' the action, when the verb 'give' is used with a second verb it means 'do it for someone's benefit'. An example can be seen in (16).

4 b ((no uptake, continues unrelated conversation))

3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

(16) CHSF2011\_02\_14S3\_1828314

In line 1 A asks B to cook plantain, but uses the 'give' construction to mean that a third party, the other family members present, will benefit (the additional comment about filming is a bit of "camera behavior" in which participants in the recording make reference to the recording equipment). This benefactive 'give' construction can occur with any of the major sentence types, and is not dedicated solely to recruitment, but when it occurs in M-A of recruitment sequences it has the effect of introducing beneficiaries through a conventionalized use of a ditransitive predicate to modify the argument structure.

# **3.4 Additional verbal elements**

In addition to the predicate and its core arguments, there are other aspects of turn design that are relevant for the format of the recruiting move. This section reviews several of these non-core elements.

### **3.4.1 Strengtheners and mitigators**

Some non-core elements can be considered strengtheners or mitigators with respect to how they upgrade or downgrade the recruitment in terms of its claimed urgency, importance, appropriateness, ease of accomplishment, and so on. One common strengthener in Cha'palaa is the word *jee*, which shares several functions: it is the main positive polarity token ('yes'), a vocative often used to secure attention ('hey'), and a strengthening element in recruitments. Usually these different functions can be easily distinguished from their context of use, but *jee* generally needs to combine with other elements like a verb to be able to specify a target action in a recruitment sequence, as in (17) where it combines with the imperative verb 'look.'

### Simeon Floyd

(17) CHSF2011\_06\_25S2\_1428820

Here A asked B to help remove some broken pieces of fiber during basket weaving, finishing the spoken part of her turn with *jee*; B then takes the proffered fiber and proceeds to fulfill by doing the task. In this position, using *jee* to help secure the attention of B can be seen as a strengthener, although it may occur in other contexts doing different things (for example, in Extract 9, line 8, *jee* occurs in the fulfillment of an object transfer request: 'here take this').

Another quite different format for strengthening consists of modulating the volume of the spoken elements of the recruiting move. Extract 18 provides a good example of this strategy in the context of a pursuit sequence.The initial recruiting move in line 1 concerns A telling his wife B to hold onto a string so he can tie it. In line 3 he produces a second recruiting move giving more information about the position he wanted her to hold ('on the tip'), implying that her first attempt at fulfillment had not been totally acceptable. Then in line 5 he repeats the format from line 3, consisting of a noun *kapa*, meaning the 'side' or 'tip' of an object, and a locative suffix *-nu*, but now produces it at higher volume.

(18) CHSF2012\_01\_20S6\_2509823

```
▶ 1 a tadi
          ta -di
          have-come.into.POS
          hold (this)
▷ 2 b ((begins to hold string))
▶ 3 a mm kapanu
          mm kapa -nu
          yeah side/tip-LOC
          yeah, on the tip
▷ 4 b ((begins to hold more firmly))
▶ 5 a KAPANU
          kapa -nu
          side/tip-LOC
          ON THE TIP!
▷ 6 b ((holds firmly so that A can cut string))
```
3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

```
7 a enu main kake
       e -nu main ka -ke
       here-LOC one grab-do
       grab one here
```
It is easy to see the difference in the two pronunciations of *kapanu* from the waveform of the audio recording (Figure 5, in which participant A increased the volume of a repeated M-A to upgrade its format in a pursuit sequence.

Figure 5: Waveform of lines 3–5 of Extract 18, comparing the different volume levels of two successive productions of the same word.

It is interesting to note that the two strengthening strategies discussed here, the particle *jee* and increased volume, both have connections to strategies for securing the attention of an addressee, either through using a vocative like 'hey!' or by making the words more perceptually salient by amplifying them. If other languages show a similar link between securing attention and strengthening recruiting moves, this may turn out to be a recurring strategy that combines securing attention to a recruitment and pursuing its fulfillment.

In addition to strengthening recruiting moves, Cha'palaa speakers also used different formats for mitigating them, or downplaying the contingency of the recruitment. One of these is a minimizing strategy that uses the word *jayu*, or 'a little bit', in order to frame a recruitment as something small, insignificant, or easily accomplished. Work on politeness strategies has noted that words or morphemes about smallness are a cross-linguistically common strategy for managing face-threatening acts like recruiting moves (Brown & Levinson 1987). In (19) A tells his wife to 'make rice', but then adds the word *jayu*. The word order is relevant because Cha'palaa is in most cases verb-final and modifiers like *jayu* generally precede their nouns, suggesting that here it was added on as a late-stage calibration of the contingency of the recruitment.

Simeon Floyd

(19) CHSF2011\_02\_15S4\_6949122

```
▶ 1 a arosya kee jayu
          aros-ya ke-e jayu
          rice-FOC do-IMP a.little
          make rice, a little.
```

```
▶ 2 b ((gets out of hammock))
```
Here it appears that the quantity of rice was not really the issue, and that *jayu* has more to do with minimization of the imposition of the recruitment.

### **3.4.2 Explanations**

Another type of strategy that may be used for mitigation of recruitments is the provision of explanations (including accounts and similar) in the same turn as the core recruiting component, providing background information that presents the target action as more necessary, justified, or reasonable (see Parry 2013; Baranova & Dingemanse 2016). For example, in (20) speaker A tells speaker B to 'clean the baby's face', which is very specific about the target action and its beneficiary, and could be a complete recruiting move on its own. However, A also adds the phrase 'it is dirty', which provides motivation for the target action.

 Explanations were present in 14% of cases that included a verbal element (*n*=27/ 192), while just 4% included mitigators (*n*=7/192), and strengtheners occurred in 10% of cases (*n*=20/192).

# **4 Move B: The responding move**

Like M-A, M-B, the responding move, can be fully nonverbal, fully verbal, or a composite. But in this sequential position, speech and nonverbal behavior are subject to different conditions than in the initial position of most recruitment sequences. Since the cases in the sample all involved practical actions that could be accomplished or begun during the interaction, most cases included some kind of

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

relevant nonverbal behavior in the response. More than half of cases (*n*=105/205) included a clearly identifiable nonverbal response, either as the only response (*n*=81/205) or as part of a composite move with verbal elements (*n*=24/2015). In a number of cases it is impossible to see whether there is a visual element of a response due to participant B moving off camera or behind another person or an object (*n*=79/205). In a smaller number of cases, responses only included verbal elements (*n*=21/205); since these cases include no practical action, they partly correlate with cases of rejection, while cases including nonverbal, practical actions tend to be cases of fulfillment.

Table 5: Fulfillment, rejection, and other response types in the Cha'palaa sample.

Table 5 shows the breakdown of different types of responses in M-B of the recruitment sequences of the sample. The data show an overall predominance of fulfillment, but also a number of other options for response, including rejection, which will be discussed below in §4.3. First, response formats will be addressed in §4.1 and §4.2.

# **4.1 Fully nonverbal responses**

Well over half (64%) of the responses in which B is visible in the video consisted of nonverbal elements only (*n*=81/126); in most cases this corresponded to the accomplishment or beginning of the target action (see also Rauniomaa & Keisanen 2012). Some target recruited actions could be accomplished quickly (e.g. A: 'to me, the soap' B: passes the soap), while for others B could only respond by beginning some activity that A can understand as projecting the completion of the target action (e.g. A: 'cook a little rice' B: begins cooking rice). Extract 21 gives an example of the former, a case of a request for the alteration of a trajectory of ongoing activity that was fulfilled immediately after M-A. Participant B had been holding a baby but was not devoting full attention and the baby was beginning

### Simeon Floyd

to slip out of his grasp. Participant A, noticing this, prompts B to hold the baby more firmly. B's change in behavior is immediate, includes no verbal elements, and is treated as a satisfactory fulfillment, in that it is no longer pursued by A beyond line 2.

```
(21) CHSF2011_01_11S3_4728040
```

▷ 2 b ((holds baby more carefully, baby stops slipping))

Also notable is the repetition of the recruitment predicate. Stivers (2004) observes that this type of repetition can be associated with urgency, and a similar connection can be made here: in the sample, several repetitions occur in recruitments dealing with alteration of trajectory in already-ongoing activities, which in this sense are more urgent than requests for services or objects, since the potential negative effects of not fulfilling the recruitment may be mounting while M-A is being produced (see also Extract 3, above, for a similar example of repetition in a case of urgency).

# **4.2 Verbal elements of responses**

In cases in which a spoken element was part of the response, some of these were rejections, especially when only a verbal element was present, as these cases included no practical activity fulfilling the request. However, verbal elements could accomplish other things as well in the sequential position of M-B. For example, in (9) above, participant B initiated repair with an interjection after the initial M-A (see Floyd 2015 on other-initiated repair in Cha'palaa). Another function that verbal elements of responses can accomplish is to manage the temporal contingencies of the sequence. For example, in (22), participant A asks participant B to take a basket, which A is holding out, but B is unable to immediately comply, so she makes it known that she intends to do the target action soon with the utterance 'wait a little'.

(22) CHSF2011\_06\_25S2\_3468149

```
▶ 1 a aanku ka' tsuude ((holding out basket))
          aanku ka -tu tsure-de
          there grab-SR lie -CAUS-IMP
          there get it and set it down
```
3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

```
▷ 2 b kai keedi ((continues previous activities))
          kayi kera-di
          little see -come.into.POS
          wait a little
  3 (1.5)
```
▷ 4 b ((takes and moves basket))

In Figure 6 A is holding out the basket for B to take, but B's hands are busy (she appears to be rubbing saliva on a dry area of her arm). Often if there is no immediate nonverbal response, speakers pursue with further recruiting turns. However, because B conveys to A she will address the target action shortly, A simply waits with the basket outstretched for a couple of seconds; in Figure 6, B takes the basket and sets it down as A requested.

Figure 6: Participant A holds out basket for participant B and tells her to 'get it and set it down' (line 1).

# **4.3 Rejections and other non-fulfilling responses**

Most examples shown in previous sections have been fulfillments. Fulfillments by definition will fall into the nonverbal or composite categories, since they must include a practical nonverbal action or its beginning (although some nonverbal actions did not count as fulfillment). On the other hand, fully verbal responses tended to be rejections, as generally rejections require some on-record statement which, while possible to convey visually, tends to be spoken (*n*=7/8). Outright rejections were rare in Cha'palaa, and only 4% of total cases featured rejection as the response (*n*=8/205), compared to 47% which included fulfillment (*n*=97/205). The fulfillment rate is even higher (55%, *n*=69/125) when considering only sequence-final cases (Table 5), reflecting how unsuccessful first attempts

### Simeon Floyd

Figure 7: Participant B takes the basket and sets it down (line 4), after having delayed a moment, saying 'wait a little' (line 2).

can be pursued for eventual fulfillment. Another type of spoken response to unsuccessful first attempts is be repair initiation, which accounted for 9% (*n*=19/205) of total responses (predictably, this rate was much lower in sequence-final cases). Additional options included ignoring M-A, or "other" responses like delegating to a third party (see Extract 7), giving information that A can use to resolve the problem him/herself, making a counter-proposal, or pursuing some unrelated sequence. These additional types of responses were generally more frequent than overt rejection, and so it seems that Cha'palaa speakers tend to opt for less explicit ways of avoiding the uptake of recruitments besides overt rejection. In addition, the types of rejections that were seen were not on-record refusals (a flat-out 'no') but tended to take other forms. In rare cases rejections could be fully nonverbal, such as in (23), where a nonverbal recruiting move – A reaching out for a slingshot – is not responded to with a transfer of the object by B, who instead pulls the object away out of reach (Figure 8).

When there is spoken material in a rejection, most often it can be classified as an account or explanation for why B is unwilling or unable to comply (87% of rejections, *n*=7/8). Extract 24 is a good example of rejection through explanation. Participants A, B, and other friends are washing clothes together, but B is getting ready to leave while A still has more to wash. A suggests that B accompany her by

### 3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

Figure 8: Participant A (in center in shirt with stripe) reaches for the slingshot (line 1) as participant B (right) pulls it back out of reach (line 2).

doing some more washing, using a declarative format ('you'll wash'). However, B has no more clothes to wash, so she offers this state of affairs as an explanation for why she cannot fulfill the request.

(24) CHSF\_2012\_08\_04S4\_1193345

```
▶ 1 a tsaaren manpipunaa manbije
          tsaa-ren man -pi -pu -nu -ya man -bije
          SEM -PRECIS again-water-put-INF-FOC again-time
          so (you) will wash one more time
▷ 2 b naaketaa manpipunu nejtaa deiñu
          naa-ke-tu-ya man -pi -pu -nu nejtu -ya de -i -ñu
          how-do-SR-FOC again-water-put-INF because-FOC CMPL-become-DR
          how can (I) wash since (it) is already finished?
▷ 3 nejtaa yumaa deiñu
          netju -ya yumaa de -i -ñu
          because-FOC now CMPL-become-DR
          since it is now finished
```
The rejection turn includes a main clause calling into question B's ability to perform the target action ('how can I wash?') as well as a clause providing an explanation, including the word *nejtu* which can be translated as 'because' or 'since' ('since it is now finished'). Requesters generally accepted such explanations amicably and did not insist, and such rejections do not seem particularly conflictive or strongly face-threatening. Here participant B is smiling as she rejects the request (Figure 9).

One final point about rejection formats is that there are relevant connections between the formats seen in the recruiting move and the formats seen in the

### Simeon Floyd

Figure 9: Participant A (center, foreground) asks participant B (right) if she will continue to accompany her washing clothes (line 1). Participant B rejects (line 2) and offers an explanation (line 3).

responding move. Particular first pair parts make relevant the provision of "typeconforming" responses (Raymond 2000; 2003). For example, the recruiting move in (25) is in the format of an interrogative clause inquiring about the existence of a target object, which is a common format for requesting objects that are not visible as discussed in §3.3.3. The response in line 2 both answers the question with the appropriate format and at the same time accomplishes rejection by appealing to an explanation citing the lack of the target object.

### (25) CHSF2011\_01\_11S2\_249991

Since B has done due diligence here by checking the basket to see if there are any limes, she does not end up being held accountable for non-compliance with the recruitment (see also Rossi 2015a and Chapter 5, §4.2.2). In many sequences which qualify as rejections speakers are able to maintain their affiliative stance, suggesting that people avoid the most fraught exchanges altogether when possible. For example, in (25) B rejects the recruitment with an affective, diminutive term 'little husband'. In general, the high fulfillment rate and low rejection rate indicate an orientation to affiliation in such sequences in Cha'palaa interaction.

3 Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

# **5 Acknowledgment in third position**