Strategy and structurein conversational influence attempts

Discourse analytic research has treated the communicative and sequential properties of conversational influence attempts (CIAs) independently. This study assemblesevidence that the communicative properties of a variety of act-types in CIA episodes can be placed on a continuum according to the degree to which the act-type isdissociated from the illocutionary force of a request. Conversationalists’ assignment ofany utterance to a place on this continuum is inherently problematic, being a matter of fallible assessment of mutual contextual knowledge. This continuum and its problematic application in conversation provides an integrated account of a variety of previously fragmented sequential patterns of CIAs.