Social interaction requires participants to establish and sustain mutual involvement in the business or topic at hand and to coordinate systematically their actions and activities. Involvement in interaction however is rarely explicitly addressed; if it were it would shift the focus of attention from the topic at hand to the problems of being involved in it. Rather, participants sustain involvement through the ways in which they behave both as speakers and the recipients of the actions of others.

Within the course of interactional activity participants themselves orient to how their actions and activities are received and attended to by their fellow participants. As studies within conversation analysis have shown, an important focus for the demonstration of receipt and related interactional work is in “next turn,” the utterance immediately following a prior. It is also found that a speaker actually within the course of an utterance may orient to the behavior of a coparticipant(s) in order to determine whether and how he or she is attending to what is being said. In this chapter I wish to explore the way in which a speaker may elicit a display of recipiency from a coparticipant and the way in which a display of recipiency is itself elicitive. By exploring the relationship between recipiency and speech I hope to cast a little light on the nature of sustaining involvement in social interaction.