Recruitment in English: A quantitative study

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of English use when recruiting
assistance from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data
from video recordings of informal conversation in English, 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). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of English
with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational
interaction.