Getting others to share goods in Polish and Norwegian: Material and moral anchors for request conventions

Abstract

The paper examines the formation of requests for sharing goods in Polish and Norwegian by focusing on the use of imperatives and Can I-interrogatives in informal settings. The study first identifies the contextual, material and embodied configurations that contribute to the selection of constructions. Then, it explores the moral roots of the divergent use of formats in similar configurations across the two languages. Employing a multimodal interactional-linguistic approach to comparable conversational data from Polish and Norwegian reality show corpora, the study demonstrates that the selection of format relies on the object’s control status and the requester’s orientation to contingencies. Imperatives are selected when the object is controlled by the requestee and no contingencies are recognized. Can I-interrogatives mark orientation to contingencies and have two realization patterns: Depending on whether the object is controlled by the requestee or not, they are used as transfer or permission requests, respectively. The study also reveals cultural differences in the selection of imperatives and transfer interrogatives across the languages. The Polish participants most often treated sharing as the requestee’s social obligation, using imperatives in the environments in which their Norwegian counterparts chose transfer interrogatives and marked that the requestee’s readiness to share was not taken for granted.