Telling somebody what to tell: “Proszę mi powiedzieć” in Polish doctor–patient interaction

Abstract

This paper examines one particular construction in Polish – Proszę (mi) powiedzieć “Please tell (me)” turn-initial position and discusses the role of grammatical resources in the constitution of actions. Specifically, the analysis of data coming from medical consultations focuses on how the participants’ deontic and epistemic orientations can be encoded in the detail of turn design. Previous, non conversation-analytic, studies of the constructions containing Proszę “please”, describe it as a performative verb that is added to another utterance to balance the explicit and unmitigated wish of the speaker to “achieve something which makes it hard for the hearer to refuse” (Królak and Rudnicka, 2006). Using conversation analysis and drawing on naturally occurring conversations between doctors and patients, my research demonstrates that Proszę (mi) powiedzieć “Please tell (me)” belongs to a subclass of conversational directives in Polish and works toward suggesting the relevance of a particular second pair part, one that aligns with the proposed course of action. The analyses presented in this paper join the current lines of research on action formation and the interplay between epistemic and deontic status and stance, suggesting that Proszę (mi) powiedzieć “Please tell (me)” may be characterized by an incongruent epistemic-deontic configuration that encodes both deontic authority and epistemic subordination.