Paul Drew (with Traci Curl/Walker & Richard Ogden University of York UK

Three ways of offering – How to make an offer in English(or, the unrequited relationship between Bush and Blair) Paul Drew (with Traci Curl/Walker & Richard Ogden University of York UK

Language & Action Language delivers action (not meaning) Actions and speech act theory (Austin, Searle) These two presentations - offering & requesting Syntax and social action

Chomsky’s trash • Distinction between competence and performance • What Chomsky put in the trash • Performance… • …because it’s messy (illformed)

Language ‘performance’: two muddled offers First, Nancy is offering to take her friend Emma shopping Nan: We:ll dih you wanna me tuh be tih js pick you Ken u you (.) get induh Robins'n? so you c'buy a li'l pair a'slippers?h (.) Nan: I mean er: c'n I getchu somethin:g? er: sump'm:? er sum’n?

Offers by and to world leaders Here’s an excerpt from Prime Minister Tony Blair trying to offer assistance to President George Bush Blair: Well… it’s only if I mean.. you know. If she’s got a, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk. .

Three lexico-syntactic formats for offering in English • Conditional (“If…then…”) • “Do you want me to…?” • Declarative forms (“I’ll do x..”)

Alternative forms for offering • When do we use these different forms? • Linguistics can’t explain - language use and pragmatics • Use not random • Appropriate use part of social competence • Look for distributions in talk

Distribution in conversations • Looked as though conditional forms used at beginnings of calls/conversations, • Do you want forms at ends of conversations, • and declaratives anywhere between/in the middle

But we were wrong - we found counter examples We found cases of conditional forms being used well after the beginning of the call (see example 7)… …and cases where declarative forms are used at the ends of calls (see example 8)

Offers as solutions to problems • Offers which are the reasons for calling • Offers interactionally generated during the conversation - in response to problems which are overt in the immediate prior talk/turn (explicit & proximate/contiguous) • Offers in response to problems which are educed from something implicit earlier in the talk (implicit & distal)

Participants’ orientations to the appropriate form of offering Self-repairs as in examples 13 & 14 indicate that participants orient to which is the appropriate form in a particular sequential environment Selection of form with which to offer is therefore normative

The unrequited relationship between Bush & Blair This interaction between Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W Bush (ex. 15) took place at the G8 meeting in St Petersburg on July 17 2006. They were breaking for lunch when Blair passed by Bush’s chair. Bush hailed Blair, and they began to discuss a crisis that had arisen concerning Israeli troops crossing into Lebanon, in attempting to rescue 3 of their soldiers. They did not realise that Bush had not switched off his microphone.

Paul Drew (with Traci Curl/Walker & Richard Ogden University of York UK