Requesting in shop encounters

Abstract

The chapter offers a systematic study of requests in shop encounters. Considering their detailed formats, constituted through the specific assembling of diverse resources including speakers’ turn, gaze, gestures, and body postures that I call multimodal Gestalts , it identifies different types of requests and their sequential implicativeness. The chapter shows how these multimodal formats are methodically bound to the categorization of speakers/customers, their epistemic and sensorial relations to the product, and as a consequence, to the response of the seller, the service they offer, and the progressivity of the encounter. In this sense, multimodal Gestalts are crucial for understanding the systematic accountability of the action and its sequential organization, as well as the social-institutional features of the situated activity in which this action is embedded. The study contributes to IL research by demonstrating how linguistic and embodied resources are deeply and systematically intertwined, and showing the necessity to go beyond talk for understanding the variation and indexicality of social actions.