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When excuse me means excuse you! On sanctioning others by ‘excusing’ oneself and relationships between form-based practices of speaking

  • This article examines the use of excuse me as a practice for invoking the complainability of another person’s conduct in the service of sanctioning it as misconduct. It explores how a form that semantically expresses its speaker’s desire to be excused (excuse me ) can be used to flag another person’s doings as transgressive or untoward. It is proposed that, to elucidate this puzzle, it is necessary to adopt a more holistic perspective and to incorporate other uses of the format (e.g., in other-initiated repair, as an attention-drawing device), as well as possible relationships between them, into the analysis. The paper offers a sketch of such a more holistic, integrative account. This account revolves around the idea that practices of speaking that mobilize similar or even the same linguistic resources implicate partially overlapping sets of affordances for action which link different usages together in a larger pragmatic landscape. As such, form-based practices of speaking and the various actions they can implement exhibit demonstrable relationships across different domains of use which may need to be taken into account when thinking about a practice’s fit to the action it implements. One of the key benefits of such an approach is that it allows for mapping out larger pragmatic landscapes and to move beyond the isolated description of individual practices of speaking.

This document is embargoed until:

2026/01/10

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Author:Uwe-A. KüttnerORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-129828
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1075/il.24006.kut
ISSN:2666-4232
Parent Title (English):Interactional Linguistics
Publisher:John Benjamins
Place of publication:Amsterdam
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2025
Date of Publication (online):2025/01/16
Publishing Institution:Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) [Zweitveröffentlichung]
Publicationstate:Zweitveröffentlichung
Publicationstate:Postprint
Reviewstate:Peer-Review
Tag:affordances; complainability; complaining; misconduct; pragmatic landscape
GND Keyword:Bedeutung; Interaktion; Konversationsanalyse; Pragmatik; Semantik
First Page:158
Last Page:192
Note:
This is a postprint of an article that was published in "Interactional Linguistics".
The published article is under copyright of Benjamins. The publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form. 
Link to the Version of Record on the publisher’s platform: https://doi.org/10.1075/il.24006.kut
DDC classes:400 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik
Open Access?:ja
Linguistics-Classification:Gesprächsforschung / Gesprochene Sprache
Program areas:Pragmatik
Licence (German):License LogoUrheberrechtlich geschützt