Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm
“Contingent Requests”: Their Sequential Organization and Turn Shape
he present study, which is a part of my larger research project exploring the relationship between the linguistic realization of utterances (grammar) and the type of actions they achieve (interaction) in their broader sequential environment, investigates request sequences in everyday German conversation. The study presents an empirical analysis of one particular type of request, i.e., “contingent requests”, and illustrates how their turn shapes are occasioned by some conditional circumstance (e.g., problems and/or conditions with granting the request) which are set up during their pre-request expansion. In particular, it shows that such contingent requests frequently contain a conditional wenn-clause (if-clause) which may be a linguistic realization of the contingent circumstance. This paper demonstrates that in a request-turn which is produced despite the previously raised conditional circumstance, the conditional wenn-clause provides a systematic solution to the interactional problem.
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm is an Assistant Professor of German Applied Linguistics, Linguistics at the University of Kansas.
