“Hand me that phone”

Bella is holding Aku’s phone and taking a call Aku asked her to pick up. Speaking into the phone, she notes she is ‘not sister Aku’. When it becomes clear the caller wants Aku, Aku asks Bella to give the phone back, adding a gesture of reaching out to receive the phone. These kinds of events (‘recruitments’) are frequent in everyday interaction and show how people weave together talk and action to get others to do things.

Dingemanse, M. (2020). Recruiting assistance and collaboration: a West-African corpus study. In S. Floyd, G. Rossi, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments (pp. 369–421). Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4018387 PDF