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
- Part II Practices of Action Ascription
- 6 Intention Ascriptions as a Means to Coordinate Own Actions with Others’ Actions
- 7 Strategy Ascriptions in Public Mediation Talks
- 8 Action Ascription and Deonticity in Everyday Advice-Giving Sequences
- 9 “How about Eggs?”
- 10 Action Ascription and Action Assessment
- 11 Actions and Identities in Emergency Calls
- Part III Revisiting Action Ascription
- Book part
- Index
- References
11 - Actions and Identities in Emergency Calls
The Case of Thanking
from Part II - Practices of Action Ascription
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2022
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
- Part II Practices of Action Ascription
- 6 Intention Ascriptions as a Means to Coordinate Own Actions with Others’ Actions
- 7 Strategy Ascriptions in Public Mediation Talks
- 8 Action Ascription and Deonticity in Everyday Advice-Giving Sequences
- 9 “How about Eggs?”
- 10 Action Ascription and Action Assessment
- 11 Actions and Identities in Emergency Calls
- Part III Revisiting Action Ascription
- Book part
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter analyses emergency calls to see how the incident report of callers is ascribed either the action of making a request to the emergency call centre or the action of providing a service to the call centre. In accordance with Whalen & Zimmerman (1987) and Bergmann (1993), we see that when the caller thanks the call-taker in response to the dispatching of assistance, the caller’s incident report is treated as a request, while the call-taker by thanking the caller ascribes to the caller the action of having provided a service. Adding to their analyses, this chapter shows that action-ascription is subject to local interactional contingencies much more than to interaction-external identities such as the caller’s relation to the incident. We show examples where callers who are directly involved in the incident are treated as providing a service and we show examples of witness-callers who are treated as making a request. For action-ascription, this means that the turn to which an action is ascribed and the turn that ascribes the action need not be adjacent. Further, this chapter shows that in these not-adjacent contexts, the interaction in between may strongly impact upon the eventual action-ascription.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Action Ascription in Interaction , pp. 256 - 276Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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