This volume, comprising studies of imperative turns at talk from ten different languages, deals with everyday and institutional interactions to deconstruct the belief that imperatives are commonly understood as impolite. Grounded in interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis, the book is divided into three parts.

The first part focuses on the structure and use of imperative turns. Chapters 2 (Jörg Zinken & Arnulf Deppermann) and 3 (Lorenza Mondada) reveal that imperative turns are associated with the embodied engagement of addressees in relation to the action mandated in German and Polish, in the first instance and in French, in the second. Mondada provides evidence that the degree of immediacy of the nominated action is linked to the selection of an imperative in place of other linguistic forms. In the fourth chapter, Giovanni Rossi investigates two alternative uses of imperatives in Italian: secondary (unilateral imperative turns) and deviant (imperative turns that violate social interaction conditions, culminating in consequences for the interaction). In chapter 5, Trine Heinemann & Jakob Steensig analyze three different combinations of the imperative with two specific modal particles in Danish, which undertake distinct types of social action, revealing different claims of entitlement, deontic authority, and moral accountability. Galina Bolden, in chapter 6, shows that requests for here-and-now practical actions in Russian, in contrast to other languages, are mostly performed through plain imperatives.

Part 2 deals with the sequentiality of imperative turns. Chapters 7 (Marja Etelämäki & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen) and 8 (Marja-Leena Sorjonen) present data from Finnish everyday interactions. While the former investigates sequences of action in which an imperatively formatted directive is resisted, culminating in the re-issuing of it through a second-person declarative, the latter explores the analysis on imperatives with and without modal particle(s), performing different responsive actions based on their sequential position and on the project in which participants are engaged. In chapter 9, Leelo Keevallik, investigating young adult daughters’ imperative responses to offers implemented by their mothers in Estonian, concludes that the daughters re-claim their deontic rights through them.

The last part of the book focuses on sequences of imperative turns in asymmetric situations. Chapter 10, by Jan Lindström, Camilla Lindholm, Catrin Norrby, Camilla Wide, & Jenny Nilsson, explores modulated (common in the opening and closing of consultations) and nonmodulated (frequent during diagnostic work) imperatives used by doctors to patients in Swedish medical consultations. Chapters 11, 12 and 13 concentrate their analyses on Finnish instructional settings. Chapter 11, by Mirka Rauniomaa, focuses on the production of directive actions by a driving instructor to a student, using second-person imperatives, and illustrating that this turn format is associated with the distribution of participants’ roles and responsibilities. In chapter 12, Melisa Stevanovic, after analyzing violin lessons, shows that unlike noncliticized imperatives and hortative turns, turns that contain clitic particles are used by the teacher to obtain the student's compliance. In chapter 13, by analyzing interactions from a cooking club, Liisa Raevaara investigates the selection of directives by a teacher in accordance with the local activity environment in which the recipients are engaged.

The studies presented in this book provide meaningful results grounded in new perceptions that concern the actions implemented by imperatives.