From their very beginning, pragmatic theories have considered the fulfillment of normative obligations as essential preconditions for the felicitous performance of speech acts (Austin 1962, Searle 1968). More recently, ‘commitments’, in particular with respect to assertions, have moved center stage in pragmatic theorizing (Geurts 2019). While these approaches adopt a normative perspective focusing on isolated speech acts, I propose to look at how participants in naturally occurring social interaction hold each other accountable for pragmatic obligations and normative expectations that they have created by their verbal actions. In social interaction, two issues concerning normative expectations inevitably arise whenever a turn-at-talk is complete: Is there a response due from co-participants? And if so, what kind of response, i.e., which type of action is normatively expected as a next action, given the type of action that the current turn has implemented?
In Conversation Analysis, but also in similar ways in other approaches as the German Dialoganalyse (Hundsnurscher 2001), these questions have been answered by proposing models of sequence organization. At the heart of these models lie concepts of projection, conditional relevance, and preference (Schegloff 1968, 2007), which account for the ways in which first actions (like questions) make second actions (like answers) expectable and their absence accountable. More recent research, however, has shown that many action-types do not fit this picture. Stivers & Rossano (2010) suggest that specific responses are not necessarily made relevant by specific action-types per se. Instead, responses are mobilized to different degrees by virtue of specific linguistic and nonverbal resources. (Stivers/Rossano 2010).
Building on this research, I will zoom in into a specific kind of practice, namely declaratives of trouble (Kendrick/Drew 2016; Fox/Heinemann 2021). In line with prior research, I will show that the declarative format in many cases rather invites than strictly normatively requires a response (cf. Gubina i.pr.). More specifically, declaratives of trouble are responded to by a wide range of different actions, whose occurrence hinges on pragmatic factors related to the nature of the trouble, speaker’s responsibility for the trouble, speaker’s vs. recipient’s competence and availability for remediating the trouble, etc.
As a conclusion, in many pragmatic contexts, obligation and normative expectation concerning next actions rather seem to be an object of negotiation within a scope for choice and agency of the responder. Instead of strict expectations concerning the occurrence of responses and specific actions types, many actions allow for a wider range of possible responses. For the responder, this means that often it is not important to produce a specific action, but that s/he is able to make their actions accountable as acceptable next moves within a cooperative context.