“How about Eggs?”

doi:10.1017/9781108673419.011

9 - “How about Eggs?”

Action Ascription in the Family Decision-Making Process While Grocery Shopping at a Supermarket

from Part II - Practices of Action Ascription

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2022

Takeshi Hiramoto and

Makoto Hayashi

Edited by

Arnulf Deppermann and

Michael Haugh

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Arnulf Deppermann: Affiliation:
Universität Mannheim, Germany
Michael Haugh: Affiliation:
University of Queensland

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Summary

By examining sequences in which families consisting of parents and their children make decisions on what to purchase while grocery shopping, this chapter explores how an incongruence between the deontic stance expressed through a speaker’s utterance and the deontic status ordinarily associated with that speaker provides resources for the recipients’ action ascription. Our data show that when the father and the children initiate a decision-making sequence, they are commonly treated by the mother as having less rights to decide what to purchase, while the mother is regularly treated by the father (and the children) as having stronger rights concerning purchase decision making. From this observation, we argue that the father and the children are ordinarily associated with a weaker deontic status with regard to purchase decision making while the mother is associated with a stronger deontic status. Sometimes, however, the father and the children use a grammatical format that indexes a deontic stance that is not consistent with their weaker deontic status. We demonstrate that this incongruence between deontic stance and deontic status provides resources for the mother to respond in such a way as to display her inference about the action performed by the father or the children.

Keywords

grocery shopping decision-making sequence deontic incongruence grammatical formats action ascription

Type: Chapter
Information: Action Ascription in Interaction , pp. 208 - 233

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108673419.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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