The Negotiation of Future Actions and Interpersonal Relations. Resisting and Insisting through Deontic, Epistemic and Affective Stances

This thesis examines how participants in future-action negotiations simultaneously insist on or resist future courses of action, on the one hand, and interpersonal claims, on the other. For this qualitative study, data was extracted from two pre-existing corpora of naturally-occurring conversations. Drawing on previous research on (parts of) future-action negotiations from two distinct research traditions - Speech-Act- theoretical Pragmatics and Conversation Analysis - this thesis takes an interactional approach and is positioned within the field of Interpersonal Pragmatics. It was demonstrated that deontics, epistemics and affect represents an effective triadic model of analysis for future-action negotiations in terms of two aspects: the actual negotiation of future courses of actions, on the one hand, and participants' interpersonal relations. This constitutes a more comprehensive alternative to the traditional way of examining proffers and refusals within Speech-Act-Theory-based im/politeness research and integrates Conversation-analytical research on individual interpersonal facets into an approach which views participants' deontic, epistemic and affective rights and obligations as key resources for the negotiation of face and interpersonal relations.

The analysis shows that a distinction can be made between primary stances and secondary stances depending on whether the claimed (lack of) power, knowledge or affect conveys an argument for/against the future action or not. Despite a close link between the verbal actions being investigated and the deontic facet, it was demonstrated that participants also negotiate future actions and who they are to one another by orienting to epistemic and affective rights and obligations. Stances can be accepted or challenges with regard to the distribution of rights and obligations they convey. Nevertheless, this does not automatically mean that an utterance is treated as interpersonally unproblematic or problematic, respectively. In addition to how participants orient to a prior speaker's stances, the overall dis/preferred turn design, the individual stances within the turn and the specific formats used to implement them are important resources for relational work. Overall, there are three possible grounds for treating an utterance as interpersonally problematic: the stance it expresses, the verbal action it implements and/or the future action it puts forward.