This chapter analyzes news discourses covering the peace talks between the Pakistan government and the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan), the culmination of which resulted in a military operation known as Zarb e Azab. The data are news stories extracted from mainstream English-language newspapers in Pakistan – Dawn and The Nation. The aim is to examine the types of discourses constructed by the print media during the peace talks. To achieve this, a qualitative analysis is employed comprising a socio-cognitive approach to CDA that focuses on the use of language and the ideological construction of peace and war situations. The chapter also highlights the importance of responsible and ethical journalism and professional journalistic practices that may help to refine the ideological sensibilities of journalists.

North Korea has remained a contentious news topic in recent decades, yet the portrayal of the country and its actions changes drastically depending on news sources. This research utilizes content analysis and critical discourse analysis to show how the Voice of America and China Radio International thematically and linguistically discuss North Korea’s threats of a nuclear strike and subsequent test-firing of missiles in March 2016. The results reveal that these government-sponsored media outlets use similar linguistic techniques to assign or avoid blame in reference to North Korea – and to China and the United States. This research is part of a larger project on critical discourse studies of state-sponsored radio outlets.

Action ascription is an emergent process of mutual displays of understanding. Usually, the kind of action that is ascribed to a prior turn by a next action remains implicit. Sometimes, however, actions are overtly ascribed, for example, when speakers expose the use of strategies. This happens particularly in conflictual interaction, such as public debates or mediation talks. In these interactional settings, one of the speakers’ goals is to discredit their opponents in front of other participants or an overhearing audience. This chapter investigates different types of overt strategy ascriptions in a public mediation: exposing the opponent’s use of rhetorical devices, exposing the opponent’s use of false premises, and exposing that an opponent is telling only a half-truth. This chapter shows how speakers use ascriptions of acting strategically as accusations to disclose their opponents’ intentions and ‘truths’ that the opponents allegedly conceal and that are detrimental to their position.

It is increasingly recognised that action ascription is not just a matter of inference, but is a form of social action in its own right. This chapter explores two key implications of this finding. First, in treating action ascription as a social action we have formal grounds for the claim that analyses of action ascription must necessarily include inspection of third positioned actions, as ascribing action is an account-able action in its own right. Second, we have procedural grounds for examining the suppression or avoidance of inferences about the action(s) in question by participants. A collection of instances of ‘offers’ that are occasioned or ‘touched off’ by some prior action, and are variously designed to be heard as such, are analysed in the course of this chapter to provide an empirical anchor for these two theoretical claims.

Human interaction is organized in time, but that organization is neither automatic nor externally imposed. It is an effortful creation within everyday interaction as participants produce next utterances and place them adjacent to their own or other’s prior utterances. Participants produce utterances in sequence using their knowledge of the normative sequential organizations of a wide range of elements of interaction, key among those elements being turns, actions, and repair initiations. These sequential organizations are distinct, although inseparable from, the triadic temporal organization of adjacency, nextness, and progressivity of elements in sequence: an organization that has been widely acknowledged, but less closely examined than sequential organizations. Examining the temporal organization of interaction reveals the procedure by which participants assess the nextness of another participant’s next adjacent utterance as they interpret prior utterances, which has direct implications for understanding how participants ascribe actions to those prior utterances. The triadic temporal organization of everyday interacting points to third position utterances as essential for the recipient in ascribing action to any given first position utterance, and as a consequence, essential for the speaker and for the recipient in together establishing the state of the talk and conduct between them.

While the role of intentions in the constitution of actions gives rise to complex and heavily controversial questions, it appears to be indisputable that action ascription in interaction mostly does without any overt ascription of intention. Yet, sometimes participants explicitly ascribe intentions to their interlocutors in order to make sense of their prior actions. The chapter examines intention ascriptions in response to a partner’s adjacent prior turn using the German modal verb construction willst du/wollen Sie (do you want). The analysis focuses on the aspect of the prior action the intention ascription addresses (action type, projected next action, motive etc.), the action the intention ascription performs itself, and the next action they make relevant from the prior speaker. It was found that intention ascriptions are used to clarify and intersubjectively ground the meaning of the prior turn, which seems otherwise underspecified, ambiguous or puzzling. Yet, they are also used to adumbrate criticism, e.g., that the prior turn projects a course of future actions which is considered to be inadequate, or to expose a concealed, problematic allegedly “real” meaning of the prior turn.

This chapter deals with action ascription in shop encounters. The study relies on video-recordings in cheese shops in twelve European countries and focuses on sequences in which the seller recognizes when the client has taken the decision to buy, even if s/he has not explicitly announced or manifested it, and displays this ascription in order to progress to the next phase of the encounter. The study analyses the sequential environment of such events, the local ecology of the activity and the multimodal resources the participants rely on for ascribing actions. Decision-making and the ascription of that decision by the other party is a crucial moment in a sales encounter. When a customer hesitates which product to buy, the seller often offers a sample to taste. After tasting, the client decides whether to buy. In this sequential environment, positive assessments (“excellent”), as well as minimal responses (“yes”, or a nod) are treated as grounds for ascribing the decision to buy to the client. The analyses highlight the role of embodied actions in the ascription of action and the multimodal formatting of the actions preceding it, showing the relevance and intricacy of these praxeological and sequential environments.

This chapter addresses action ascription in everyday advice-giving sequences, with a focus on those sequences in which advice has not been solicited as such. We argue that for action ascription in both second and third positions, the design (‘composition’) and the sequential location (‘position’) of the prior turn are crucial. Advice-giving typically emerges in the environment of a complaint or troubles-telling; in second position, the recipient must then decide whether or not it warrants advice. In third position, the recipient of a piece of advice must decide how exactly it was meant: as a binding prescription or injunction, or as a mild suggestion for a possible way forward? This is relevant for the advice-recipient in deciding how to deal with the advice: whether to accept or reject/resist it, or to join the other in brainstorming about how to remedy the situation. Relatively strong deontic formats position advice-givers as experts who know best what their interlocutor ‘needs’, and tend to be resisted; weaker formats call on the recipient not so much to accept or reject the advice given as to acknowledge or agree that the action in question would be a possible course of action with beneficial effects.

This chapter analyses emergency calls to see how the incident report of callers is ascribed either the action of making a request to the emergency call centre or the action of providing a service to the call centre. In accordance with Whalen & Zimmerman (1987) and Bergmann (1993), we see that when the caller thanks the call-taker in response to the dispatching of assistance, the caller’s incident report is treated as a request, while the call-taker by thanking the caller ascribes to the caller the action of having provided a service. Adding to their analyses, this chapter shows that action-ascription is subject to local interactional contingencies much more than to interaction-external identities such as the caller’s relation to the incident. We show examples where callers who are directly involved in the incident are treated as providing a service and we show examples of witness-callers who are treated as making a request. For action-ascription, this means that the turn to which an action is ascribed and the turn that ascribes the action need not be adjacent. Further, this chapter shows that in these not-adjacent contexts, the interaction in between may strongly impact upon the eventual action-ascription.

In the course of responding to the many themes on action ascription raised in this volume, this chapter briefly outlines some of the main resources – both internal and external to the turn – that may contribute to the process. It is suggested that action ascription involves the integration of ‘bottom-up’ resources within the turn (including grammar, lexicon, prosody, gaze and multi-modality) with ‘top-down’ resources external to the turn (sequence position, location of the sequence within a broader activity, institutional contexts, and personal statuses and the rights accruing to them). Work on the integration of these resources may also shed light on the apparent rapidity with which action ascription is achieved by comparison with the slower pace of turn projection. It is possible that the apprehension of turn-external characteristics may interface with turn initial elements to conduce towards this outcome.

What is the relation between words and action? How does a person decide, based on what someone is saying, what an appropriate response would be? We argue: (1) Every move combines independent semiotic features, to be interpreted under an assumption that social behaviour is goal-directed; (2) Responding to actions is not equivalent to describing them; (3) Describing actions invokes rights and duties for which people are explicitly accountable. We conclude that interaction does not involve a binning procedure in which the stream of conduct is sorted into discrete action types. Our argument is grounded in data from recordings of talk-in-interaction.