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In:Grammar in Action: Building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction
Edited by Jakob Steensig, Maria Jørgensen, Jan Lindström, Nicholas Mikkelsen, Karita Suomalainen and Søren Sandager Sørensen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 37] 2025
► pp. 47–77

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Chapter 3
‘Idea-Suggestions’ in an interactional grammar

Sequential organization and grammatical formats

 | University of Helsinki
 | University of California Santa Barbara
Published online: 3 June 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.37.03cur
Abstract
In this chapter, we explore the grammar of ‘Suggestions’ and the sequences they engender. ‘Suggestion’ is used here as a technical term to refer to a speaker forwarding an action to be performed by the recipient that will benefit the recipient. The data suggest several sub-types of Suggestion, the focus here being on the sub-type in which a speaker initiates a sequence by volunteering an idea for something that the other might do to their benefit, which we call ‘Idea-Suggestion’, or ‘I-Suggestion’. We discuss the formats that speakers of American English use to put forth these kinds of Suggestions, and argue that the tentativeness built into the work that I-Suggestions do reveals what participants orient to in the trajectory of the ensuing sequence. A final section explores how our findings might be captured in an interactional grammar of American English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and procedure
  • 3.Features of Idea-Suggestion sequences
    • 3.1Preliminaries to I-Suggestions
    • 3.2Formats for I-Suggestions
      • 3.2.1‘Why don’t you’ (WDY) formats
      • 3.2.2Formats with obligation and necessity modals
      • 3.2.3Hypothetical conditional formats
      • 3.2.4Formats with ability and possibility modals
      • 3.2.5Formats with ‘you want to’
    • 3.3Responses to I-Suggestions
  • 4.Idea-Suggestions vs. Advice-Suggestions
  • 5.Idea-Suggestions in an interactional grammar
    • 5.1Idea-Suggestions: From action to grammar
    • 5.2Idea-Suggestions: From grammar to action
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
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