Brokering co-participants’ volition in request and offer sequences

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company. This chapter examines multilingual interactions where bilingual participants engage in advancing mutual understanding between other participants by language brokering (e.g. Bolden 2012) requests and offers from Finnish to Brazilian Portuguese. Brokering turns involve either (i) declarative statements regarding the prior speaker’s volition towards the requested/offered matter or (ii) questions concerning the recipient’s volition. The use of these formats displays the broker’s intersubjective interpretation of locally relevant features of the action, such as the distribution of benefits and agency, and contingencies in its realization. The investigation of language brokering in this context also contributes to research on requests, offers and related social actions (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen 2014), action ascription (Levinson 2013; Deppermann & Haugh forthcoming), and on verbs expressing volition (Sacks 1992: 181; Schulze-Wenck 2005).