Producing and accepting offers: the co-construction of discourse in goal-oriented interaction

In face-to-face conversation, participants are co-responsible for the content, structure and effectiveness/acceptability of the interaction. This is especially true in goal-oriented communication, whose development and outcome depends on participants’ mutually relevant contributions. A case in point is that of dialogic speech acts. This paper examines offering sequencing in the transcripts of 30 open role-plays elicited from American native speakers through written prompts. The findings show that offerers and offerees employ these strategies: A) identical Conversation Management moves meeting communicative needs (e.g. opening/closing the interaction); B) complementary moves in line with participants’ initiating vs responding communicative-transactional roles such as Pre-condition ‘Mentioning or inquiring about the prerequisites that make the offer possible/sensible’ vs Pre-condition Check ‘Ascertaining pre-conditions for performing the offer’; Illocution Motivator ‘Justifying the offer’ vs Reaction motivator ‘Justifying the acceptance of the offer’; Acceptance-maximizer ‘Maximizing chances of acceptance’ vs Commitment Maximizer ‘Maximizing chances of the offerer’s commitment to the offer’ or Need Minimizer ‘Downplaying the need for the provision of a good/service’; and C) parallel, equivalent moves that move the interaction-transaction forward such as Background ‘Mentioning or inquiring about the characteristics of the offered good/service, or its provision and acceptance’; Negotiations ‘Checking, discussing or ratifying aspects/conditions of the feasibility of the offer’; Next steps ‘Announcing, proposing, inquiring about, acknowledging the (verbal) actions favouring the realization/acceptance of the offer’. The study reveals that: moves can be recognized by considering their content and positioning in the conversation, and especially through function-detecting heuristic prompts; the strategies realizing offers and reactions to them are similar across different interactional role-relationships; clusters of illocution-relevant moves show preferred sequencing patterns; and interlocutors cooperate towards the co-construction of goal-oriented interaction.