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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

By
Takeshi Hiramoto  and
Makoto Hayashi
Edited by
Arnulf Deppermann  and
Michael Haugh
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 shoppingdecision-making sequencedeontic incongruencegrammatical formatsaction ascription
Type
Chapter
Information
Action Ascription in Interaction , pp. 208 - 233
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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