This book sets out to explore the interplay between syntax and social actions via an analysis of requests drawn from a corpus of German conversations. As Taleghani-Nikazm is at pains to point out, many earlier studies of requests have adopted speech act theory and used isolated requests occurring in elicited data. The present work, in contrast, uses the methodology of Conversation Analysis and draws its data from naturally occurring conversations. Its particular interest is not in isolated utterances but in the sequential organization of the interactions within which requests are made. Taleghani-Nikazm claims that while focusing on patterns of interaction in German, she is also describing language-general features of request sequences.

After an introductory chapter explaining the scope of the book and identifying some important concepts, the second chapter reviews some earlier studies of requests in German and describes the corpus used, which consists of 25 hours of recordings of mainly telephone conversations, involving 22 speakers in all. However, this large body of recordings actually yields only 30 instances of requests for action, and in fact, the attentive reader will note that in the whole book only around a dozen interactions are actually cited, several of these being quoted repeatedly across the various chapters.

The analysis proper is presented in three chapters. The first of these, chapter 3, looks at the pre-request turns by which speakers project the possibility of the occurrence of a request, identifying three forms of such pre-sequences: questions inquiring about the availability of the object or service to be requested, “accounts” describing the speaker’s difficulty in obtaining the object or service, and expressions of likes or dislikes. Chapter 4 deals with the use of accounts to justify the making of a request, examining their content, grammatical structure, and placement within the request turn. In the corpus under study, most accounts occur after the request and can, Taleghani-Nikazm suggests, be perceived as “remedial work,” often serving to indicate that the circumstances leading to the request are out of the speaker’s control and thereby to make the request seem more acceptable. There is also a detailed discussion of the use of clauses introduced by weil with main-clause word order. Finally, chapter 5 looks at talk prefatory to pre-requests, exploring ways in which speakers introduce a topic that will allow them to make the request. It distinguishes a range of strategies ranging from nonspecific prefatory components, such as general attention-getting devices, through more specific components that relate previous turns to the new topic, to the most specific components that reveal the type of projected action.

While the work certainly provides a thorough and meticulous account of the examples under study, this comes with a certain amount of repetition, notably in the frequent summaries of findings and the presentations of exchanges. In fact, one is left with the impression that the text is actually longer that it needs to be, and has perhaps been padded out a little to meet the length requirements for such a monograph.