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Using cases of misalignment and realignment in the unfolding of interactional sequences in which future actions and events are being negotiated in everyday English conversation, this paper demonstrates that participants distinguish between the initiating actions of Proposal*, Offer*, Request*, and Suggestion*, if these labels are understood as technical terms for distinct constellations of answers to the questions (i) who will carry out the future action? and (ii) who will benefit from it?. The argument made is that these different action types are routinely associated with different sets of recurrent linguistic forms, or social action formats, and that it is through these that speakers can frame their turns as implementing one action type as opposed to another and that recipients can recognize these actions as such and respond to them accordingly. The fact that there is only a limited amount of 'polysemy', or overlap in the formats commonly used for Proposals*, Requests*, Offers*, and Suggestions* in English conversation, means that these formats deliver often distinctive cues to the type of action being implemented. When misalignments and realignments occur, they can often be traced to the fact that 'polysemous' linguistic formats have been used to implement the initiating action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to shed a light on children's pragmatic development by examining Mandarin-speaking children's requests in interactions with their parents. It is found that children between 24 and 36 months old appear to use various request forms, primarily with simple imperatives and WANT statements. A closer examination reveals that children prefer to use simple imperatives in activity-based interactions while both primary forms are found in unstructured daily conversations. The findings suggest that children's preference for simple imperatives may be driven by their awareness of parents' cooperativeness in interactional situations. It is thus speculated that simple imperatives and WANT statements may be children's two primal request forms, but they may pivot on one request form when the situation is right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the cross-linguistic devices of requests written by native English-speaking (NSE) and native Cantonese-speaking (NCS) respondents in an academic context on the basis of 197 discourse completion tests. Both groups asked in a direct sequence accompanied by a different proportion of syntactic and lexical devices to reduce directness. NES used a higher frequency and a wider range of syntactic downgraders than NCS. NCS, however, used a higher frequency of lexical downgraders and a greater number of combinations of lexical devices than NES. The cross-linguistic comparison of the linguistic features of Cantonese and Engish requests demonstrates how the distinctive linguistic properties of each language and social factors combine to constitute a request. Further investigation could be made between idealized and authentic English and Cantonese requests for a range of age groups and contexts, or to compare the linguistic forms of requests made by NCS in English with the linguistic forms of requests made by NES in Cantonese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]