Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Cha’palaa use when recruiting
assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The
chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Cha’palaa,
and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative
project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this
volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic
structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural
and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of
action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of
recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project
(see Chapter 2 of the volume). The present chapter extends our knowledge of the
structure and usage of the Cha’palaa language with detailed attention to the
properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a
contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.