Book contents
- Action Ascription in Interaction
- Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics
- Action Ascription in Interaction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Constituents of Action Ascription
- 2 Temporal Organization and Procedure in Ascribing Action
- 3 The Micro-Politics of Social Actions
- 4 Action Ascription, Accountability and Inference
- 5 Attributing the Decision to Buy
- Part II Practices of Action Ascription
- Part III Revisiting Action Ascription
- Book part
- Index
- References
5 - Attributing the Decision to Buy
Action Ascription, Local Ecology, and Multimodality in Shop Encounters
from Part I - Constituents of Action Ascription
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2022
- Action Ascription in Interaction
- Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics
- Action Ascription in Interaction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Constituents of Action Ascription
- 2 Temporal Organization and Procedure in Ascribing Action
- 3 The Micro-Politics of Social Actions
- 4 Action Ascription, Accountability and Inference
- 5 Attributing the Decision to Buy
- Part II Practices of Action Ascription
- Part III Revisiting Action Ascription
- Book part
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter deals with action ascription in shop encounters. The study relies on video-recordings in cheese shops in twelve European countries and focuses on sequences in which the seller recognizes when the client has taken the decision to buy, even if s/he has not explicitly announced or manifested it, and displays this ascription in order to progress to the next phase of the encounter. The study analyses the sequential environment of such events, the local ecology of the activity and the multimodal resources the participants rely on for ascribing actions. Decision-making and the ascription of that decision by the other party is a crucial moment in a sales encounter. When a customer hesitates which product to buy, the seller often offers a sample to taste. After tasting, the client decides whether to buy. In this sequential environment, positive assessments (“excellent”), as well as minimal responses (“yes”, or a nod) are treated as grounds for ascribing the decision to buy to the client. The analyses highlight the role of embodied actions in the ascription of action and the multimodal formatting of the actions preceding it, showing the relevance and intricacy of these praxeological and sequential environments.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Action Ascription in Interaction , pp. 105 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
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