Recruitment in English: A quantitative study

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of English use when recruiting assistance from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in English, and reports language- specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of English with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction