Insubordination and the contextually sensitive emergence of if-requests in Swedish and Finnish institutional talk-in-interaction

Abstract

This chapter reports a study of Swedish and Finnish insubordinate om and jos ‘if’ clauses from a synchronic perspective as the clauses emerge in interactional sequences of action. Insubordinate conditional clauses have the potential to function as complete directives without any main clauses: the recipients are able to treat them as such, responding to the directive as soon as the insubordinate clause is produced. The authors show that the emergence of insubordinate conditionals is anchored in projectable, often routinized interactional trajectories, in which the verbal action is enhanced with multimodal communication. Routinization and contextual cues play a particularly prominent role in the kind of data that are analyzed here: service encounters and medical consultations. Insubordinate conditional requests emerge in interaction in response to verbal and non-verbal actions done (and not done) by the recipients of the requests, and are thus a product of the interaction of participants in conversation.