Prompting offers of assistance in interaction

Michael Haugh
The University of Queensland

One of the ways in which we can get someone to do something for us is through
hinting. However, studies that have attempted to systematically examine re-
questive hints have faced difficulties in identifying hints as they are designed,
by definition, to be ambiguous with respect to the intentions of that speaker. An
alternative to this kind of circularity is to shift the analytical lens away from pu-
tative speaker intentions as the starting point of analysis. In this paper it is sug-
gested that a properly pragmatic account of prompted offers requires systematic
analysis of the situational conditions which afford the participants’ understand-
ing of them as prompted, along with an appreciation of the three-part sequential
architecture that is immanent to prompting offer sequences. It is concluded that
pragmatic act theory has an important contribution to make to ongoing efforts
to better understand fundamental processes of social action formation and
ascription.

Keywords: offers, pre-requests, hints, non-conventional indirectness, intention,

speech acts, pragmatic acts, interactional pragmatics

1. Off-record requests and requestive hints

One of the most commonly studied sets of social actions in pragmatics is where
someone attempts to get someone else to do something for them, what are common-
ly termed requests, orders, commands, and so on in English. In Searle’s (1969) typol-
ogy of speech acts they fall under the broader category of ‘directives’. Traditionally,
the focus has been on ‘verbal requests’, that is, where someone says something to
someone else, because they want someone else to know they want that someone
else to do something for them (Wong 2015).
In pragmatics a three-way division between (1) ‘direct requests’ (e.g. Bring me
a cup of tea), (2) ‘on record conventionally indirect requests’ (e.g. Can I have a cup
of tea?), and (3) ‘off-record indirect requests’ (e.g. Have you had any tea yet?) is
generally postulated, following Brown and Levinson (1987). Off-record requests

Pragmatics and Society 8:2 (2017), 183–207. doi 10.1075/ps.8.2.02hau

issn 1878-9714 / e-issn 1878-9722 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
184 Michael Haugh

involve instances where (a) “H must make some inference to recover what was in
fact intended”, and (b) “it is not possible to attribute only one clear communicative
intention to the act” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 211). Brown and Levinson out-
line a range of strategies by which speakers can invite such inferences, including
“hinting” and “giving association clues”, many of which involve flouting the relation
maxim. Hinting, according to Brown and Levinson involves “raising the issue of
some desired act” (e.g. This soup’s a bit bland; It’s a bit cold in here; That window isn’t
open), while giving association clues involves “mentioning something associated
with the act required of H” (e.g. Oh God, I’ve got a headache again) (p. 215).
This basic framework has been developed in various ways. It has been suggest-
ed that requestive hints vary in their degree of opacity (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain
1984). Weizman (1985), for instance, distinguishes between the “illocutionary
opacity” of hints, namely, the degree to which the speaker’s intention that some-
thing is being requested can be readily inferred by the hearer, and their “proposi-
tional opacity”, namely, the degree to which what is being requested by the speaker
can be readily inferred by the hearer. Different sub-strategies for requestive hints
have also been postulated. Leech (2014: 158), for instance, distinguishes between
“statement hints” and “question hints”. Examples of statement hints include “stat-
ing potential reasons for the request”, while instances of questions hints include
“questioning the feasibility of the requested act” or “questioning the hearer’s com-
mitment” (Weizman 2007: 145).
Notably, requestive hints are said to involve instances where the speaker
avoids being held committed to having requested something (Brown and Levinson
1987: 215; Grice ([1987]1989: 368; Weizman 1989), although the speaker expects
the hearer is likely to be able to work out the intended request (Holdcroft 1976: 150–
151). The net overall effect is that the hearer is expected to infer that the speaker
wants them to know that the speaker wants something from them without the
speaker having to say it (Bertuccelli Papi 1999: 67). In other words, the speaker cre-
ates a warrant for the other person to infer that something is being treated as “better
left unsaid” (by the speaker), “though not undone” (by the hearer) (Pomerantz
1980: 195). This means that requestive hints in fact constitute an attempt by the
speaker to avoid having to make a request altogether. The expected response to a
‘hint’ is thus not to comply with (or decline) the request, as is the case for ‘direct’ and
‘conventionally indirect’ requests, but instead to offer (or alternatively disattend)
the desired object or assistance (Jacobs and Jackson 1983: 296).
This difference is important because it follows that ‘requesting’ does not have
the same moral implications for participants as ‘prompting an offer’. The latter
allows the addressed recipient to display a greater degree of agency (Enfield 2014),
for instance, because he or she is given the opportunity to volunteer the object or
assistance in question (Kendrick and Drew 2016). In addition, given that prompting
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 185

an offer treats any incipient request as better left unsaid, such ‘hints’ also display a
claim to “weaker deontic rights” on the part of that speaker (Couper-Kuhlen and
Etelämäki 2015: 23). That is, the participants orient to the speaker’s lower degree
of entitlement (with respect to the recipient in question) to be making any such
request in the first place (Lindström 2005; Stevanovic and Peräkylä 2012). The
interpersonal implications of ‘requestive hints’, including whether they might be
evaluated as ‘polite’, ‘impolite’ and so on, arguably derives from the locally situated
attainment of these deontic stances (Haugh 2015: 310), thereby offering an expla-
nation for the consistent finding in pragmatics research that such ‘hints’ are not
always evaluated positively by participants (Blum-Kulka 1987; Terkourafi 2011;
Sifianou 1993, 1997). Instead, whether a ‘requestive hint’ is evaluated as ‘polite’, ‘not
polite’, ‘impolite’ and so on by participants depends on aspects of the participants’
understandings of their respective deontic rights and the situated context itself.
However, despite the fundamental differences in the moral and interpersonal
implications of ‘prompting offers’ as opposed to ‘requesting’, the way in which hear-
ers respond to ‘hints’ has not been systematically examined in pragmatics. Previous
work on requestive hints has also brushed over the problem of ascertaining what the
speaker’s intentions might actually be, as Ogiermann (2015b) has recently noted.
It is commonly assumed that in the case of ‘hinting’ speakers are expecting hearers
will most likely infer their intended meaning (Brown and Levinson 1987: 215; Leech
2014: 158; Weizman 2007: 144). That hinting is an intentional act on the part of the
speaker is built into the semantics of hinting as it were (Bertucelli-Papi 1999: 67;
Grice [1987]1989: 368). Framing the analysis of prompted offers as a study of ‘re-
questive hints’ thus inevitably involves the analyst attributing particular intentions
to speakers. The problem with making this analytical assumption is, however, as
Drew and Couper-Kuhlen (2014) point out, that “people’s actual intentions (and
other mental states) are unknowable, as is the matter of what might have been in
someone’s mind at the time of performing an action” (p. 6). Moreover, given the
whole point of hinting is to avoid being accountably committed to requesting some-
thing (Brown and Levinson 1987: 215), this makes identifying them in interaction
as intended by that speaker rather challenging for the analyst to say the least. 1
Ogiermann (2015b) thus argues that even when “‘hints’ are highly transparent in
the contexts in which they are produced, there is no conclusive evidence that they
are intended as requests or even interpreted as such by the person providing the
object” (p. 31).

1. See Haugh (2008, 2015: 95–98, 122–141) for an overview of the epistemological and ontolog-
ical challenges facing the analyst when attempting to identify or trace the intentions of speakers
vis-à-vis what they have been taken to implicate.
186 Michael Haugh

An alternative to this kind of ontological circularity is to shift the analytical

lens away from putative speaker intentions as the starting point for researchers
towards first undertaking a systematic analysis of how speakers prompt offers of
assistance, how recipients respond to such prompts, and what kinds of situational
contexts afford these kinds of prompts. An analysis of the latter, in particular, is
arguably what allows participants (and thus analysts) to recognise some action on
the part of another participant as prompting an offer in the first place. To study such
instances where offers of assistance are prompted by prior talk or conduct, then,
we need a “a theory of action that specifies, for any given situation, the limitations
and possibilities the situation is subject to or opens up” (Mey 2001: 214, original
emphasis). In other words, we need draw from a systematic account of expectations
about what kinds of act are apposite in particular interactions (Mey 2010a: 445). In
pragmatic act theory, the way in which such expectations afford particular actions
is accounted for through the notion of “pragmeme”, that is, a “general situational
prototype capable of being executed in a situation”, which when instantiated in a
particular situated context, constitutes an “individuated, individual pragmatic act”,
or “pract” (Mey 2001: 221; see also Capone 2005: 1357). Importantly, a pragmeme
is interactionally accomplished through discourse, unlike speech act theory (Searle
1969), which is tied to the analysis of individual utterances.
In this paper, I consider the way in which pragmatic act theory can usefully
inform the analysis of prompted offers of assistance. I focus primarily on examining
instances where offers of assistance are prompted through what have traditional-
ly been called ‘requestive hints’ in pragmatics, but which I here term ‘prompts’.
Prompting involves one participant inviting another participant to initiate some
kind of social action, thereby avoiding accountability for having launched that
social action sequence (cf. Culpeper and Haugh 2014: 190; Haugh 2015: 262). The
term ‘prompting’ is deliberately used here in an attempt to forestall the assumption
that the speaker is necessarily always intending to prompt an offer of assistance,
although it remains a possibility. 2 Indeed, as we shall see in the course of this paper,
both prompts and responses to prompted offers (in cases where they are indeed
forthcoming) are recurrently formatted in ways that avoid speakers being held
accountably committed to having intended to prompt the offer in question.
I begin by first briefly outlining, in Section 2, the dataset and method of anal-
ysis utilised in this study. I then examine, in Section 3, instances where reporting
needs, difficulties, troubles, absences and so on can prompt offers of assistance,
thereby avoiding a request, yet also allow recipients to freely disattend such reports

2. The term “prompting” is equivocal with regards to putative intentions. We may be prompted
to offer assistance to someone who has fallen down, for instance, by virtue of them having fallen
down, without them having to say or otherwise indicate they need help.
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 187

as prompts. I then suggest that construing such prompting as intentional is in-

teractionally sensitive, as participants work to avoid making available inferences
about the offer-recipient’s intentions through both the design of prompted offers
and subsequent non-straightforward responses to them. In Section 5, I go on to
contrast instances of prompted offers with pre-emptive offers on the basis that the
latter arise in response to hearable preliminaries to a request and recurrently occa-
sion straightforward acceptance of the offer. In Section 6, I suggest that a properly
pragmatic account of prompted offers requires systematic analysis of the situational
conditions which afford the participants’ understanding of them as prompts, along
with an appreciation of the three-part sequential architecture (Arundale 1999) that
is immanent to prompting offer sequences. I conclude by considering the impli-
cations of this analysis for the study of social action in pragmatics more broadly.

2. Dataset and method

It has been observed that participants make, through both the format of requests
and their responses to them, a distinction between requests for assistance (i.e. for
assistance at some future time) and requests for concrete objects (prototypically
in the here-and-now) (Drew and Couper-Kuhlen 2014). The focus in this paper
is on analysing cases where offers of assistance are prompted, as opposed to offers
of concrete objects. A collection of 37 sequences in English in which there was no
overt request (i.e. a direct or conventionally indirect request), yet offers of assis-
tance were forthcoming or hearably withheld, was first assembled. Examples were
taken from the author’s own recordings and associated transcriptions, along with
transcriptions (and recordings where available) of data from other researchers, as
well as from the CA bank in Talkbank.
An attempt was initially made to identify instances of prompted offers of assis-
tance through operationalising the distinction drawn by Jacobs and Jackson (1983)
between ‘hints’ (i.e. where reports of or inquiries about needs, difficulties or troubles
elicit or bring about offers of assistance thereby avoiding the request altogether), and
‘pre-requests’ (i.e. inquiries or statements, typically about what Searle [1969] calls
preparatory conditions for requests, which properly lead into a request). 19 candi-
date prompting sequences and 18 candidate pre-request sequences were identified,
with 14 and 13 of these, respectively, involving offers of assistance.
However, rather than only relying on the form of the putative prompts or pre-­
requests, the offers in question were further analysed with respect to subsequent
talk that followed them. The focus of this subsequent analysis was on the nature
of responses to these offers of assistance (i.e. in cases where no overt request was
made), as well as the overall structural organisation of the interactions in which
188 Michael Haugh

the sequence in question was identified (where available). From this expanded
sequential and sequence analysis two distinct versions of offering emerged (Sacks
1992b: 331), namely, offers accomplished as prompted by a prior reporting, and
offers accomplished as pre-emptive of an incipient request. While the nature of the
report or inquiry that preceded the offer, as well as the format of the offer itself
provided some cues as to what kind of offer was being accomplished by the par-
ticipants, as we shall see, it was primarily in the design of responses to these offers
that participants distinguished between these two sequential versions of offering.

3. Prompting offers of assistance in English

While work in pragmatics has traditionally focused on verbal requests for assis-
tance, there is an increasing body of evidence to indicate that these constitute only
one of the ways in which assistance in the here-and-now may be ‘recruited’ (Drew
and Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Enfield 2014; Kendrick and Drew 2016). A number of
studies have illustrated that assistance may be solicited not only verbally, but also
through a whole range of semiotic resources (e.g. Goodwin 2006; Goodwin and
Cekaite 2014; Ogiermann 2015a; Rossi 2014). Kendrick and Drew (2016) have thus
recently proposed that various practices for the recruitment of assistance lie along
a continuum: (1) verbal requests for assistance, (2) reports of needs, difficulties or
troubles that elicit offers of assistance, (3) trouble alerts, (4) embodied displays of
troubles, and (5) projectable troubles. These recruitment practices differ not only
with respect to the design of turns through which they are implemented, but with
regard to the responses they make contingently relevant. While verbal requests for
assistance make granting (or not) the request in question contingently relevant as
a next response (Sacks 1992a), for instance, reports of needs, difficulties or troubles
occasion “an opportunity for a recipient to offer assistance” (Kendrick and Drew
2014: 111). In other words, while verbal requests or pre-requests mobilise responses
that orient to the prior turn as a request or request-implicative (Stivers and Rossano
2010), reports of needs, difficulties or troubles invite a “volunteered” response that
orients to the prior report as proffering an assistable.
Offers involve the provision of objects or assistance to a recipient by a speaker,
either offers of immediate assistance in the here-and-now or offers of deferred
assistance in the future (Lindström 2017). While offers may be ‘recruited’ through
troubles alerts (e.g. interjections like ‘oh’ or ‘oops’) or embodied displays of trou-
bles (Kendrick and Drew 2016), a number of studies have focused on the ways in
which reporting needs, difficulties, troubles or noticeable absences may prompt
offers of assistance (e.g. Curl 2006; Drew 1984; Gill, Halkowski and Roberts 2001;
Haugh 2015: 262–268; Jacobs and Jackson 1983; Kendrick and Drew 2014, 2016;
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 189

Sanders and Fitch 2001; Vinkhuysen and Szymanski 2005). In this section, I focus
specifically on instances where participants prompt both immediate and deferred
offers of assistance through reporting needs, difficulties, troubles or noticeable ab-
sences. Such reports stand in contrast to instances of inquiries that project an in-
cipient request, what have generally been termed ‘pre-requests’ in CA (Sacks 1992a;
Schegloff 2007). The latter may occasion ‘pre-emptive offers’, that is, where inquiries
are treated by participants as properly leading into or substituting for requests for
assistance (Jacobs and Jackson 1983: 300). Prompts, on the other hand, are designed
to avoid requests (Jacobs and Jackson 1983), as prompting an offer creates an “an
opportunity for a recipient to offer assistance” (Kendrick and Drew 2014: 111, em-
phasis added), rather than mobilising the granting (or not) of an incipient request
as the contingently relevant next response (Stivers and Rossano 2010). For that
reason participants may, of course, legitimately disattend such reports as prompts.
Offers of immediate assistance in the context of the activity of sharing a meal
or snack may be prompted by reporting noticeable absences (Haugh 2015). The
following excerpt is taken from a conversation recorded when Mike was visiting
his former piano teacher, Mary. Prior to this excerpt, Mary, who is not particularly
mobile, had just brought out tea and biscuits for them to share.

(1)  DS300007: 3:34

10 Mary: ((while eating)) ↑o:h.
11 (0.8)
12 Mike: [°m:m°
13 Mary: [I haven’t gotten y’a bread ‘n butter plate but (0.4)
14 there’s one in the cupboard if you want one.
15 Mike: mm? o::h ↑sho:uld be okay? I’ll j[u-
16 Mary: [yo[:u alright?]
17 Mike: [d’yu d’yu]
18 do you want one?
19 Mary: u::m yea- (.) well it’s le- less messier actually.
20 Mike: okay.
21 Mary: u:m. on the bottom shelf,
22 Mike: mhm.
23 Mary: just above the stove.
24 Mike: ((takes two plates and brings them back to the table))

The excerpt begins with a noticing by Mary, namely, that they don’t have plates
on which to eat the biscuits (lines 10, 13), followed by the declaration that Mike
can help himself to a plate if he so desires (line 14). Mike initially responds to this
turn as an offer by rejecting it through claiming he does not need a plate (line 15).
However, he subsequently orients to this noticing as Mary prompting Mike to of-
fer to get a plate for her (lines 17–18), notably, almost simultaneously with a re-
sponse pursuit by Mary (line 16) that treats his prior response as in some respects
inadequate (Bolden, Mandelbaum and Wilkinson 2012; Pomerantz 1984). Mary
190 Michael Haugh

then accepts his offer (line 19), although with a non-type conforming response
(Raymond 2003) that indicates some degree of resistance to the way in which Mike
has formulated the grounds for making this offer, namely, that Mary prefers to eat
off plates and that she intended him to go and get one for her because of that (Haugh
2015: 195). Notably, Mary’s acceptance of the offer is also well-prefaced, project-
ing that her response will be non-straightforward (Schegloff and Lerner 2009),
while the turn-final “actually” indicates that her reconstrual of the grounds for
accepting Mike’s offer are contrary to what she presumes Mike to be expecting here
(Clift 2001). Mike subsequently gets a plate not only for Mary but also for himself
(line 24), thereby simultaneously addressing both of Mary’s possible agendas here.
Offers of future assistance may also be prompted by reporting absences. In
the following excerpt from near the end of a phone call between Lesley and her
mother, Lesley has just suggested her mother not bring too many things when she
comes to visit (presumably to avoid having to move around a heavy suitcase with
her on the bus).

(2)  Holt: X(C):1:2:7: 8:18

472 Les: ↑don’t bring↑ too much
473 (0.2)
474 Mum: ↑Oh that’s w’I wz g’n t’tell ↓you I’m:- (.) I’m ↑not
475 bringing an (.) I’m not bring any big j:ump- (.) big
476 ca:rdigans
477 (0.2)
478 Les: No: y[ou c’n
479 Mum: [or a dressing gow:n I- .a (0.2) I[c’n ba-
480 Les: [No-
481 (.)
482 Les: You c’n[↑borrow mi↓:ne
483 Mum: [( )-
484 Mum: Yeh I thought w’l I’d brin:g the small case (’n
485 [just)
486 Les: [eeYes do.
487 Mum: ( ).
488 Les: .hh
489 (0.2)
490 Mum: Okay love

Following Lesley’s advice that she not bring too much luggage, her mother indicates
she won’t bring any heavy clothes (lines 475–476). This is formulated as a ‘touched
off ’ recalling of her intention to let Lesley know of her intention to not bring any
warmer clothing (line 474). Immanent to this reporting of an intended absence of
warmer clothing in her plans for her luggage is the trouble that might arise if the
weather turns cold, an inference that prompts Lesley’s subsequent, initially aban-
doned (line 478) and then re-started, offer to lend her dressing gown to her mother
while she visits (line 482). Lesley’s mother doesn’t straightforwardly accept this offer,
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 191

but instead tacitly registers it through the implicated premise that is immanent to
her restating of her intentions to bring a small case (in which heavy clothes will not
fit) in line 484, a plan of action that elicits explicit support from Lesley (line 486).
Similar to the example above, then, the recipient does not straightforwardly accept
the prompted offer in question, and whether the such an offer was intentionally
prompted remains a distinct possibility but analytically opaque.
It is thus clear that the way in which such reports can prompt offers of assistance
is not necessarily tied to the putative intentions of speakers. Consider the following
excerpt from an initial interaction between two American study abroad students,
Linda and Jim, who are currently studying at a university in Australia. The excerpt
begins when Jim discloses that he has been offered a job at Surfers Paradise (at the
Gold Coast), although he claims to not be sure whether he will take the position
(lines 550–552).

(3)  CAAT: AmAm01: 14:12

550 J: I:- I (0.2) ↑kinda got a job in [Sur↑fers] bu:t I’m=
551 L: [↑ni:ce. ]
552 J: =not ↑su:re if I gonna <ta:ke ↓it>
553 (0.2)
554 J: [.hh >cause] like it’s like< really bad hou:↓rs=
555 L: [↓ni:ce:. ]
556 J: =[>like it’s<]
557 L: =[doing what ]
558 (.)
559 J: ah: i- (.) pizza.
560 (.)
561 L: ↑oh:
562 J: yeah it’s ah: (.) I work like the night shifts on
563 Frida- and [Saturday night?] it’s like ten: P M to=
564 L: [o h y e a h ]
565 J: =five A M=
566 L: =oh shi(hh)t [haha ]
567 J: [yea:h.] so hh I even need to find someone
568 in Surfers I can sta:y with [like ] before the=
569 L: [yea:h]
570 J: =bu(hh)ses start £go:[ing£ ]
571 L: [well you can] ↑stay with ↑me:
572 I [live in] ↓Sur[fers.]
573 J: [°oh° ] [oh ] sweet [that’s] awesome but=
574 L: [(but) ]
575 J: =↑a:lso like (0.4) if I worked every week↑en:d that
576 like completely kills >my travel time↑< and [I’m only]=
577 L: [ yea:h ]=
578 J: =here ‘til July:. right?

Jim then goes on to offer reasons why he is not sure about taking the job. He first re-
fers to the hours as “really bad” (line 554). It subsequently emerges that the trouble
with these hours he is being offered is that there would not be any buses returning
192 Michael Haugh

to Brisbane (where he lives) at 5am and so he would need to find someone to stay
with at Surfers Paradise (lines 564–567). Subsequent to reporting this difficulty
with transport and the need for a place to stay, Linda proposes in lines 568–569
that Jim can stay with her as she has a place in Surfers. This offer is formatted as a
modal whereby she gives Jim permission to stay at her place (i.e. You can X). Given
this offer is positioned sequentially contiguous with Jim’s reporting of a need to
find somewhere to stay before the buses back to Brisbane resume, it is apparently
designed to be heard as prompted by Jim’s reporting.
However, there is little evidence to suggest that this offer is prompted by Linda
making inferences about Jim’s possible intentions here (i.e. that he was intending to
elicit such an offer from her). First of all, Jim evidently does not know that Linda
lives near Surfers Paradise, or at least she believes he does not know this, given
she asserts this as new information for him (in line 569). Second, Jim responds by
indicating appreciation of the offer (line 570), but then goes on to enumerate oth-
er reasons why he thinks he probably won’t take up the job offer (lines 572–575),
and so ultimately his response to the offer is rejection-implicative. It is difficult,
therefore, to maintain the position that Jim is (intentionally) hinting he would like
Linda to offer somewhere to stay (cf. Ogiermann 2015b: 31). Nevertheless, her offer
is evidently prompted by a reported need on his part.
It is not so much inferences about the putative intentions of the prior speaker,
then, but rather more fundamentally inferences about what that speaker might need
or want that occasion such offers of assistance. In other words, it is by attending to
particular aspects of the context, including possible needs, desires, difficulties or
troubles of another participant inferable from what has been reported, that such
offers are afforded. Such inferences are, of course, defeasible. This means that not
only speakers can legitimately deny having any intention to seek an offer of assis-
tance, but recipients may legitimately disattend such reports as prompts for an offer
of assistance.
In the following section, I go on to suggest that not only are inferences about the
putative intentions of speakers defeasible, but that construing instances of prompt-
ing offers of assistance as intended by that speaker is an interactionally delicate
matter.

4. Prompted offers and the interactional sensitivity

of intentions ascription

Offers of assistance in English may be prompted, as we have seen, by a prior speak-

er reporting troubles, difficulties, needs or noticeable absences. Such offers are
predicated on inferences about what the recipient of the offer might want or need.
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 193

However, as scholars in pragmatics have repeatedly pointed out, such ‘prompts’

or ‘hints’ are designed to avoid the recipient of the offer being held committed to
requesting assistance. One upshot of this is that ascribing an intention to be seeking
such an offer arguably becomes an interactionally sensitive or delicate matter. This
can be seen in cases in which participants accomplish offers of assistance in ways
that avoid exposing the prompting as an intentional attempt to get one of the partic-
ipants to do something for the other. Through both the design of offers of assistance
themselves, and responses to those offers, participants can avoid legitimising the
inference that the recipient was intending to procure such an offer. 3
Offers of assistance can, of course, be made in a number of different ways in
English (Aijmer 1996; Leech 2014). CA studies have demonstrated that the linguis-
tic and embodied formats of offers are fitted to particular interactional trajectories
(Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Curl 2006; Hofstetter and Stokoe 2015; Kärkkäinen and
Keisanen 2012). These social action formats (Fox 2007) not only involve “recurrent
and sedimented ways of accomplishing specific social actions in talk-in-­interaction”
(Couper-Kuhlen 2014: 624), but are designed to accomplish particular kinds of
offers (Curl 2006; Hofstetter and Stokoe 2015). In particular, these different offer
formats vary in the degree to which they “display [the speaker’s] agency in initiating
offers of assistance” (e.g. I will X; If Y then [I will] X), or “expose the implicit desires
of others” (e.g. do you want/need X) (Curl 2006: 1257).
A range of social action formats were found to be used in the accomplishment
of prompted offers. Amongst the 14 examples of prompted offers examined, exam-
ples of interrogatives (e.g. can I X?), declaratives (e.g. I will X; you X; I have X; if Y
then I will X), and imperatives (e.g. X) were found, including 5 prompted offers that
foregrounded the “implicit desires” of the recipient through variations on the basic
do you want X (DYW) format. However, it was notable that in cases where these
desires on the part of the recipient were foregrounded, the offers were treated as
dispreferred by those participants in this dataset. This was accomplished primarily
through delaying the offer so as to avoid it occurring in next position, that is, as
immediately contiguous to the prior reporting of troubles, difficulties, needs and
so on, or subsequently re-implementing the offer of assistance in a different format
following self-initiated repair (Curl 2006: 1269–1271; Drew, Walker and Ogden
2013: 84–85). As Curl (2006) notes this is to avoid displaying the inference that the

3. It is worth noting that in ongoing intimate or communal relationships such reports or notic-
ings may be recurrent and thus hearable as requests (Terkourafi 2013). However, in such cases,
we are no longer dealing with the off-record prompting of offers, but a practice that has become
conventionalised for those participants as a form of requesting (Terkourafi 2011). In such cases,
one might expect the offer to be readily and straightforwardly accepted, although this remains
to be confirmed through systematic study.
194 Michael Haugh

prior talk or conduct was a “fishing device” (Pomerantz 1980) that was intentionally
“designed to get the offerer to do something” (Curl 2006: 1274). 4
Close examination of responses to prompted offers also indicated that par-
ticipants treated the construal of instances of prompting offers of assistance as
intentional as an interactionally sensitive or delicate matter. While it was found that
such offers of assistance were routinely accepted, consistent with Schegloff ’s (2007)
claim that “offers prefer acceptances” (p. 60), these acceptances were recurrently
non-straightforward or equivocal. 5 That is, prompted offers of assistance did not
occasion straightforward ‘yes’-like responses and appreciations, but instead occa-
sioned rather more granular responses. Acceptance of the offer was recurrently
construed as dispreferred through well-prefacing and delaying acceptance of the
offer (Heritage 2015; Schegloff 2007). This non-straightforward acceptance of the
offer occurred either within that subsequent turn (see Excerpts 1 and 2), or was
delayed by one or two turns, we can see in the following excerpt.

(4) NB:IV:4R:17
449 Emm: .hh[h B’t] I : g o]tta get my turkey ah’ll go up to uh
450 Lot: [A:n’ ] yihknow.]
451 Lot: ah:’ll take yih up wednesdee.
452 (0.7)
453 Emm: .t.hhhh W’l I gotta (0.6) Oh: yeah but will it
454 tha:w out by then,hhh[hh
455 Lot: [Why it’s thaws out overni:ght,h
456 (0.3)
457 Emm: °Does it?°
458 Lot: Why he:ck ye:↓ah.
459 (0.7)
460 Emm: .t Ok*a::y,

Here, Lottie offers to take her sister Emma to go and buy a turkey for Thanksgiving
(line 451), subsequent to Emma stating her plan to go and buy one (line 449),
which is hearable in this case as a source of “difficulty” for Emma as Lottie is aware
Emma’s husband isn’t around to give her a ride to the shops (data not shown).
Emma initially orients to situational contingencies around accepting Lottie’s offer
(lines 453–454), but then subsequently accepts the offer (line 460).

4. Hofstetter and Stokoe (2015) have argued that an offer formatted as ‘do you want me to X’
(DYW) also foregrounds the burden on the speaker (p. 736). However, while offers designed
with this level of granularity may be construed as preferring rejection (Clayman and Heritage
2014: 74; Hofstetter and Stokoe 2015: 736), all instances of prompted offers that were formatted
as DYW offers in this dataset were accepted, albeit not straightforwardly.
5. Out of the 14 sequences involving prompted offers, 12 occasioned non-straightforward ac-
ceptances or equivocal responses.
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 195

In other cases, the offer was initially rejected and only subsequently accepted,
as we can see in the following example, in which Gladys offers to phone in an order
for Emma along with her own groceries.

(5) NB:IV:2R:3–5
4 Emm: well [I may ]have to] go up t]o the store=
5 Gla: [when the bo]ys come] ho:me ]
6 Emm: =I don’t have any foo:d uh: (.) uh:v I had some
7 GROUND ROUND I fru-uh defrosted las’ night ih didn’t
8 ta[ste too] good so I (.) threw the rest=
9 Gla: [°ye:h° ]
10 Emm: =of it ou:t en [I’ve]hh [.hh-
11 Gla: [ah: ] [you have to be careful of that
12 (.)
13 Emm: AND I didn’t li:ke eh aw hadda little tiny (0.2) bih-
14 piece a’ fish so I don’ know I may have to go to the
15 store but you go ahead Gladys ‘n phone it up
16 °I thin:k uh maybe°
17 (.)
18 Gla: they’ll send it do:wn
19 (.)
20 Emm: ye[ah
21 Gla: can I add anything for you:
22 Emm: .hh Oh: honey thanks I think ah:’ll ah let Guy go=
23 Gla: [Yes.
24 Emm: [Maybe (you) get some fi:sh:.
25 Gla: Ye:s.

The offer from Gladys in line 21 follows talk from Emma where she ponders aloud
whether she needs to go and buy some more food (line 4), having been reduced to
eating fish from the freezer that she doesn’t like (lines 6–8, 13–14), followed by a
repetition of her possible need to go out shopping (lines 14–15). Once again, going
out shopping is hearable as a “difficulty” for Emma as Gladys knows she does not
drive. While Emma initially rejects the offer (line 22), she subsequently accepts it
(line 24).
Finally, prompted offers also occasioned equivocal responses where the re-
cipient neither accepted nor explicitly rejected the offer of assistance in question,
thereby leaving the offer open to being taken up at a later point, as evident in the
following excerpt.

(6) Rahman:II:6
16 Jen: But it gets me down a bit you know[ah: mean I ca:n’t
17 Ida: [(Loo:k.)
18 Jen: I ca:n’t mo:ve? yihknow ‘ee[siz where yih goi:[n g,]=
19 Ida: [(What) [Well]=
20 Jen: =[(goin ot- we:y-)]
21 Ida: =[a h’v to:ld j]u:.
22 (.)
196 Michael Haugh

23 Jen: Mm[:?
24 Ida: Jis ↑send im round here fer a
25 [couple’v: hou:[r:s
26 Jen: [ehh! .hh [But then
27 Jen: (tha-) B’t[you know ^I:der I]never go ^anywheah [do I:.]
28 Ida: [( )] [I:: |kn]ow

Jenny has been sharing troubles she has been having with her young son, now that
Basil is no longer around (data not shown), and the feelings of being hemmed in it
has given rise to (lines 16, 18, 20). This troubles talk is followed by an offer by Ida
for Jenny to send the guest around to her place for a while (lines 24–25) to enable
her to take a break. Jenny’s response to this offer in lines 26–27 is equivocal as she
offers an account for why that might not be necessary, but does not reject it as such,
thereby leaving it open for acceptance at a later point in time.
Responses to prompted offers were thus found to be recurrently granular, de-
signed in ways that avoided straightforward acceptance of the offer of assistance.
In doing so, the recipient of the prompted offer not only orients to the local contin-
gencies of what accepting such an offer might entail, but also simultaneously resists
a construal of the prior reporting as intentionally prompting that offer.
While the position in speech act theory, and indeed much of pragmatics more
generally, is that the speaker’s intentions, perceived or actual, are constitutive
of social action, systematic examination of prompted offers suggests otherwise.
Participants may well discursively construe an offer as responsive to the perceived
intentions of the prior speaker who reported these particular needs, difficulties or
troubles. However, given the way in which offers that are formatted in ways that
foreground the desires of the prior speaker are treated as dispreferred, and that
responses to prompted offers are recurrently not straightforward acceptances of
the offer in question, it appears that construing such prompting as intentional is
an interactionally delicate matter. The question for the professional analyst is thus
not ‘is this prompting intended?’ (cf. Ogiermann 2015b: 31), but rather ‘do these
participants construe this prompting as intended?’, or ‘in what ways do these par-
ticipants avoid construing this prompting as intended?’
The characterisation of prompting offers of assistance that has been undertaken
here suggests that analytic attention should not be directed to the putative inten-
tions of speakers, but rather to aspects of the context (including what is said and
done by participants) that afford offers of assistance. This arguably leads us into an
attempt to formalise prompting offers of assistance as a pragmatic act. However,
before doing so, in the following section, I briefly discuss pre-emptive offers that
may arise in pre-request sequences and how they appear to differ from prompted
offers of assistance.
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 197

5. Pre-emptive versus prompted offers of assistance

To pre-empt a request involves producing an offer before a turn that implements the
request is produced, thereby forestalling the production of that request. In order to
count as pre-emptive, the offer is produced in response to an inquiry or account that
is hearably preliminary to a forthcoming request. Incipient requests are indexed
as such through the speaker drawing attention to an incipient requestable as the
primary business of that sequence. In the following well-cited example, Fred pro-
jects an incipient request through explicit mention of having “a big favour to ask”.

(7) ST
1 Fred: Oh by the way ((sniff)) I have a bi:g favour
2 to ask ya
3 Laur: Sure, go’head.
4 Fred: (.)‘Member the blouse you made a couple
5 weeks ago?
6 Laur: Ya.
7 Fred: Well I want to wear it this weekend to Vegas
8 but my mom’s buttonholer is broken.
9 Laur: Fred I told ya when I made the blouse
10 the buttonholes.
11 Fred: Ya ((sniff)) but I hate ta impose.
12 Laur: No problem. We can do them on Monday after work.
(Schegloff 1980: 112–113)

In this example, Laura produces a pre-emptive offer (lines 9–10) following a report-
ed trouble in lines 7–8. Unlike the reportings of troubles, difficulties, needs and so
on examined in the previous section, however, this report is produced subsequent
to a turn that has established the relevance of requesting (lines 1–2). Notably, Fred
readily accepts the offer, albeit in a way that indicates recognition of the possible
imposition of the unstated request (line 11), which prompts a denial of imposition
by Laura (line 12).
In other cases, the speaker draws attention to the incipient requestable through
a summons following by an inquiry.

(8)  (C is standing in the hallway of the speech department, holding the hand of his
15-month old son, Curtis)
1 C: Hey, Debbie.
2 Are you going to be free from 1:30 to 2:30?
3 D: Yeah. I think so.
4 You want me to watch him?
5 C: Yeah.
6 D: I’d love to. It’d be a pleasure.
7 C: Okay. Thanks. I’ll bring him around then.
(Jacobs and Jackson 1983: 299)
198 Michael Haugh

In this example, C draws Debbie’s attention to a forthcoming course of action

through a summons (line 1) followed by an inquiry about her availability (line 2).
Debbie responds first with a go-ahead (line 3) followed by an offer of assistance
(line 4), which C readily accepts (line 5). That an incipient requestable is the pri-
mary business of that sequence may also be signalled through making an inquiry
about the purpose of the interaction in question (see Levinson 1983: 359).
In the collection of 18 pre-request sequences that was examined here, two
key characteristics of pre-emptive offers emerge. First, they are produced in re-
sponse to an inquiry or account that is hearably preliminary to a forthcoming
request. What makes the inquiry or account hearable as such is through mention
of asking (a prototypical speech act verb for ‘requesting’ in English), a summons
that indicates the speaker is seeking the recipient attend to some matter, or an
inquiring, for instance, about that recipient’s availability or intended future action
that foreshadows a requestable. Second, such offers of assistance are recurrently
straightforwardly accepted. 6 There is thus no attempt by the recipient of the offer
to avoid the inference that he or she wanted or intended an offer of assistance to be
forthcoming. Indeed, in order to count as pre-empting such an inference must be
readily available to those participants.
There are ongoing debates in CA about whether pre-requests really do prefer
pre-emptive offers (Lerner 1996: 314; Levinson 1983: 359–363; Sacks 1992a: 685;
Schegloff 2007: 90; Taleghani-Nikazm 2006; cf. Kendrick and Drew 2014: 89; Walker
2013: 462, fn.6), or whether in some instances such inquiries or accounts might be
better understood as substituting for requests rather than being ‘pre-requests’ per se
(i.e. as properly leading into a request) (Fox 2015; Lindström 2005: 213). However,
this should not be taken to mean that pre-emptive offers do not constitute a possible
response to an inquiry or account that is hearably preliminary to a forthcoming re-
quest. The point in this section has simply been that offers which are accomplished
as ‘pre-emptive’ can be contrasted with those that are ‘prompted’ through close
examination of features of the sequences in which they arise that afford the offer in
question, and responses of recipients to such offers. In doing so, we arguably gain
further insights into how we might develop a more formal account of prompting
offers of assistance as a pragmatic act.

6. Out of the 13 sequences in which pre-emptive offers were identified, 11 were straightfor-
wardly accepted.
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 199

6. Prompting offers of assistance as a pragmatic act

We have seen that prompting offers of assistance involves, at minimum, three dis-
tinct sequential moves. The way in which it inevitably requires active participation
from at least two participants across at least three sequential turns in order to be
accomplished is consonant with claims by Mey (2001), that without uptake actions
cannot be accomplished as social actions. For that reason, pragmatic act theory
(Mey 2001, 2010a, 2010b) arguably offers a useful entry point for developing a more
theoretical account of instances where offers of assistance are prompted in English.
The first move in such sequences involves reporting needs, difficulties, trou-
bles or noticeable absences, which may be hearable as a prompt for some kind of
action on the part of the recipient with respect to that reporting. In cases where the
reporting constitutes an “assistable” (Kidwell 2000: 23), that is, “a circumstance for
which an assisting action in response is relevant” (Downing 2008: 107–108), the
reporting is hearable as an opportunity for the recipient to proffer assistance. In
other words, what affords an interpretation of such a reporting as a prompt for an
offer of assistance is the affordances of that locally situated common scene (Mey
2001), in particular, the potential for the recipient to respond to the reporting as
an assistable, that is, something about which they can potentially do something (as
opposed to, say, an advisable or an object for expressing empathy). As Mey (2010b)
notes, “we conclude, or infer, on the basis of not only what we hear or observe in
the situation, but in accordance with our being ‘set-up’ to hear and observe exactly
that, being allowed to speak and behave in just those fashions that make sense in
the situation” (p. 2883). In cases where offers of assistance are prompted, the partic-
ipants are set up to “hear” the reporting of needs, difficulties, troubles or noticeable
absences as a prompt for just such an offer by virtue of the potential for one of those
participants to offer assistance.
However, given that such reports only invite an offer and do not make one a
contingently relevant next response, participants may, of course, legitimately di-
sattend the reports as prompting an offer of assistance. They may instead construe
the reporting as simply a ‘telling’ that makes registering it as new information
contingently relevant (Heritage 1984), ‘troubles talk’ that makes an affective display
of empathy contingently relevant (Jefferson 1988), or a form of ‘advice solicitation’
that makes advice-giving contingently relevant (Haugh and Chang 2015). In oth-
er words, reports of needs, difficulties or troubles do not necessarily prompt an
offer of some object or assistance (cf. Kendrick and Drew 2016), but do so when
proffering an object or assistance is afforded by the larger activity or project in
which the participants are engaged. Whether this larger activity or project affords
an understanding of the reported needs, difficulties or troubles as constituting an
200 Michael Haugh

assistable is informed, in turn, by their ongoing relational histories and propensity

to offer assistance without being asked to do.
The second move in prompting sequences involves the offer of assistance it-
self. As we have noted, offers are implemented through social action formats that
accomplish them as a particular kind of offer. Prompted offers appear designed to
strike a balance between three competing interactional demands. First, the sensi-
tivity demonstrated by speakers of various forms of English about burdening others
with having to undertake some action (Clayman and Heritage 2014; Hofstetter and
Stokoe 2015; Kendrick and Drew 2014; cf. Brown and Levinson 1987), which can
lead to the rejection of the offer being treated by the participants as the preferred
response. Second, the local contingencies to which accepting the offer in question
would give rise (Curl and Drew 2008; Heritage 2016). And third, the sensitivity
demonstrated by participants with regard to foregrounding the recipient’s implicit
desires to have just such an offer made (Curl 2006), and thereby exposing the
prompting as an intentional attempt to ‘fish for’ an offer. The latter seems to be
treated, however, as one of the primary concerns of the participants in the da-
taset examined here, as when offers were formatted in ways that did potentially
foreground the putative desires of the recipient they were invariably delayed, and
thereby construed as not immediately responsive to the prior reporting of needs,
difficulties, troubles or noticeable absences.
The third move in prompting sequences recurrently involves non-straightfor-
ward acceptance or an equivocal response to the offer of assistance. In responding
to the prior offer in this way, the recipient avoids confirming the inference that he
or she intended to procure this offer of assistance. The raison d’être of prompting
offers is, of course, that the offer is accomplished as if it were merely ‘touched off ’ by
the reporting. Prompting offers thus does not substitute for a request in the way that
a pre-requestive inquiry may (Jacobs and Jackson 1983), but arguably constitutes
an interactionally achieved pragmatic act that avoids the need to make any request
altogether (Pomerantz and Heritage 2013: 219).
In sequences where offers of assistance are prompted, then, three interlocking
moves are involved, as summarised in Figure 1.
This general situational prototype for prompting offers of assistance is arguably
what affords the locally instantiated examples of this pragmatic act that we have
examined in this paper. Notably, what underpins this social action is not a two-part
adjacency pair, then, but rather a three-part sequential architecture, consonant
with the Conjoint Co-Constituting Model (CCM) of communication (Arundale
1999, 2010).
However, while canonical instances of this pragmatic act can be readily ob-
served in interaction, as we have discussed, Sacks (1992b) cautions that we should
be careful to avoid thinking of social actions as simply a series of different objects,
 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 201

Move 1:
reporting need,
difficulty, troubles
or noticeable absence

Move 2:
prompted disattend as
offer prompt

Move 3:
non-straightforward
or equivocal
response

Figure 1.  Architecture of prompting offer sequences

that is, as ‘offers’, ‘requests’ and so on. Instead, he proposes that social action is better
conceptualised as being accomplished through “sequential versions of a something”
(p. 331). For instance, what starts as being hearable to participants as preliminary to
a request may ultimately be accomplished as avoiding a request through prompting,
and vice versa. Consider, for instance, the following excerpt noted down by author.

(9)  (Michael is a visitor at Sirl’s place. They have both stopped outside of the bathroom at
the same time)
1 S: What time are you leaving this morning?
2 M: Oh, in about an hour I suppose. Are you in
3 a hurry to leave?
4 S: No, no. Just asking.
5 ((2 second pause))
6 M: Would you like to use the bathroom first?
7 S: Yeah, sure, if you don’t mind.
(Haugh 2007: 94)

While Sirl makes an inquiry that draws attention to an incipient requestable in

line 1 (i.e. that Sirl would like to use the bathroom first), and which arguably prefers
a pre-emptive offer from Michael (i.e. that Sirl use the bathroom first), Michael
delays making such an offer through seeking an account for such a request on Sirl’s
behalf (lines 2–3), thereby indicating reluctance on his part to make a pre-emptive
offer without further justification. Sirl, however, “pointedly refrain[s] from sup-
plying the upcoming request” (Jacobs and Jackson 1983: 300) by denying that his
inquiry was designed as preliminary to a forthcoming request (line 4). Following
202 Michael Haugh

a long pause (line 5), Michael proposes that Sirl use the bathroom first (line 6), an
offer which is readily accepted by Sirl (line 7).
It is apparent, then, that in cases like this, “recipients hear the sequences as
leading up to something which is not being done for some reason” (Jacobs and
Jackson 1983: 300). In this case, what is initially hearable as a preliminary to an
incipient request (i.e. as properly leading into a request) is retrospectively construed
as prompting (i.e. as avoiding a request altogether). The moral implications of these
two different “sequential versions” of Sirl getting what he apparently wants (to use
the bathroom first) are clear. 7 Whether a reporting or inquiry is treated as prelim-
inary to a request, as substituting for a request, or as avoiding a request is clearly
being treated as consequential by these participants, a symptom of the ongoing
“micro politics” of social interaction (Drew 2011).

7. Concluding remarks

Our job in pragmatics is to further our understanding of not only what ordinary
folk can readily recognise and label, but also of the characteristics of social actions
that are not always immediately obvious to the casual lay observer. While lay users
recognise that speakers may get others to do things for them ‘off record’ through
hinting, in this paper it has been argued that the traditional approach to requestive
hints in pragmatics places too much credence in the ordinary language view that
such cases necessarily involve recognition of the putative intentions of the recipient
of an offer. Given that the actual intentions of that participant, if indeed they even
had conscious awareness of such intentions, are essentially unknowable both to
the other participant(s), and consequently the analyst, it might appear that we are
left trying to undertake research about phenomena, requestive hints, despite not
being sure we are actually dealing with examples of them (Ogiermann 2015b: 31).
However, not only does the received view of requestive hints generate a pernicious
form of ontological circularity, it arguably leads us to neglect other important an-
alytical questions. In this paper, I have suggested that rather than persisting with
the traditional speech act-based approach to social action, shifting to an account
of social action as pragmatic acts encourages us to consider what aspects of the
common scene of a particular encounter between interactants affords. In particu-
lar, it leads us to consider how the talk or conduct of those participants affords an
understanding of that talk and conduct as implementing particular social actions. It
is in that respect that pragmatic act theory arguably is better placed than traditional

7. See Kádár and Haugh (2013: 74–76) for further discussion.

 Prompting offers of assistance in interaction 203

speech act theory to contribute to ongoing efforts to better understand fundamental

processes of social action formation and ascription.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers along with Robert Arundale for their helpful
comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank Paul Drew, John Her-
itage, Liz Holt and Kobin Kendrick for kindly sharing copies of data with me. Finally, I would
like to acknowledge the support of a Discovery grant from the Australian Research Council
(DP120100516) that has enabled the research reported in this paper to be undertaken.

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About the author

Michael Haugh is Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures at the Uni-
versity of Queensland. He has published widely in journals and edited volumes in pragmatics,
and recent books include Im/Politeness Implicatures (2015, Mouton de Gruyter), Pragmatics and
the English Language (2014, Palgrave Macmillan, with Jonathan Culpeper), and Understanding
Politeness (2013, Cambridge University Press, with Dániel Z. Kádár). In addition, he has co-ed-
ited a number of books, and is also co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics.

Author’s address
Michael Haugh
School of Languages and Cultures, Room 323, Gordon Greenwood building
The University of Queensland
St Lucia QLD 4072
Australia
michael.haugh@uq.edu.au