It is increasingly recognised that action ascription is not just a matter of inference, but is a form of social action in its own right. This chapter explores two key implications of this finding. First, in treating action ascription as a social action we have formal grounds for the claim that analyses of action ascription must necessarily include inspection of third positioned actions, as ascribing action is an account-able action in its own right. Second, we have procedural grounds for examining the suppression or avoidance of inferences about the action(s) in question by participants. A collection of instances of ‘offers’ that are occasioned or ‘touched off’ by some prior action, and are variously designed to be heard as such, are analysed in the course of this chapter to provide an empirical anchor for these two theoretical claims.

While the role of intentions in the constitution of actions gives rise to complex and heavily controversial questions, it appears to be indisputable that action ascription in interaction mostly does without any overt ascription of intention. Yet, sometimes participants explicitly ascribe intentions to their interlocutors in order to make sense of their prior actions. The chapter examines intention ascriptions in response to a partner’s adjacent prior turn using the German modal verb construction willst du/wollen Sie (do you want). The analysis focuses on the aspect of the prior action the intention ascription addresses (action type, projected next action, motive etc.), the action the intention ascription performs itself, and the next action they make relevant from the prior speaker. It was found that intention ascriptions are used to clarify and intersubjectively ground the meaning of the prior turn, which seems otherwise underspecified, ambiguous or puzzling. Yet, they are also used to adumbrate criticism, e.g., that the prior turn projects a course of future actions which is considered to be inadequate, or to expose a concealed, problematic allegedly “real” meaning of the prior turn.

This chapter deals with action ascription in shop encounters. The study relies on video-recordings in cheese shops in twelve European countries and focuses on sequences in which the seller recognizes when the client has taken the decision to buy, even if s/he has not explicitly announced or manifested it, and displays this ascription in order to progress to the next phase of the encounter. The study analyses the sequential environment of such events, the local ecology of the activity and the multimodal resources the participants rely on for ascribing actions. Decision-making and the ascription of that decision by the other party is a crucial moment in a sales encounter. When a customer hesitates which product to buy, the seller often offers a sample to taste. After tasting, the client decides whether to buy. In this sequential environment, positive assessments (“excellent”), as well as minimal responses (“yes”, or a nod) are treated as grounds for ascribing the decision to buy to the client. The analyses highlight the role of embodied actions in the ascription of action and the multimodal formatting of the actions preceding it, showing the relevance and intricacy of these praxeological and sequential environments.

This chapter addresses action ascription in everyday advice-giving sequences, with a focus on those sequences in which advice has not been solicited as such. We argue that for action ascription in both second and third positions, the design (‘composition’) and the sequential location (‘position’) of the prior turn are crucial. Advice-giving typically emerges in the environment of a complaint or troubles-telling; in second position, the recipient must then decide whether or not it warrants advice. In third position, the recipient of a piece of advice must decide how exactly it was meant: as a binding prescription or injunction, or as a mild suggestion for a possible way forward? This is relevant for the advice-recipient in deciding how to deal with the advice: whether to accept or reject/resist it, or to join the other in brainstorming about how to remedy the situation. Relatively strong deontic formats position advice-givers as experts who know best what their interlocutor ‘needs’, and tend to be resisted; weaker formats call on the recipient not so much to accept or reject the advice given as to acknowledge or agree that the action in question would be a possible course of action with beneficial effects.

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.

In the course of responding to the many themes on action ascription raised in this volume, this chapter briefly outlines some of the main resources – both internal and external to the turn – that may contribute to the process. It is suggested that action ascription involves the integration of ‘bottom-up’ resources within the turn (including grammar, lexicon, prosody, gaze and multi-modality) with ‘top-down’ resources external to the turn (sequence position, location of the sequence within a broader activity, institutional contexts, and personal statuses and the rights accruing to them). Work on the integration of these resources may also shed light on the apparent rapidity with which action ascription is achieved by comparison with the slower pace of turn projection. It is possible that the apprehension of turn-external characteristics may interface with turn initial elements to conduce towards this outcome.

Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.

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.

My starting point is that certain actions are ‘valued’ over others, in ways that are not restricted to pairs of possible actions (therefore not restricted to adjacency pairs). For instance, it may be regarded in certain corporate and political worlds as better to have ‘resigned’ than to have been fired. The micro-politics of social action is evident in the manoeuvres by which participants implement or avoid certain actions, always remembering that the relative value of an action is a situated attribute. I consider some of the systematic ways in which participants ‘position’ themselves with respect to certain action environments. From among the varied ways participants manoeuvre and position themselves regarding implementing and avoiding action, three stand out: (i) avoiding taking an action, in such a way that the other responds as though the (absent action) implication had been performed (other’s ascription to self of an action self might have been avoiding); (ii) disguising an action, through (mis)attributing to one’s own speech an action which may differ from the action that is thereby implemented (self-ascription); and (iii) treating a prior turn/action as having been what it was not officially designed to be/do (denying, disclaiming, ‘misattributing’ actions) (other-ascription).

Social actions are recipient-designed actions that occur in the context of interaction sequences. This chapter focuses on sources and practices for the formation and ascription of social actions. While linguists stress the relevance of linguistic social action formats, conversation analysts highlight the relevance of the sequentialposition of an action, and sociolinguists point to the influence of social identities for action-formation and -ascription. The combination of these three approaches helps us to solve the analytic problem of indirectness, which, however, only rarely becomes a problem for the participants in an interaction themselves. Social properties which recurrently apply when using verbal and bodily resources of action-formation, i.e. the social actions themselves, inferred meanings, projected next actions, the participation framework, the activity type, speaker’s stance, participants’ identities, etc. lead to stable pragmatic connotations of those forms, i.e. action-meanings, which become idiomatic and part of our common-sense competence. Still, social actions are multi-layered and can be ambiguous at times. Therefore, their meaning can be open for negotiation. Intersubjectivity of action ascription is ultimately secured neither by conventions nor by speaker’s intentions, but is accomplished by their treatment in subsequent discourse