The demand ticket: A conversational device for getting the floor

Abstract

This paper proposes a formal account of a conversational device we all use to secure the speaker turn and to obligate others to adopt a listener role. The analysis examines the primary presuppositions which underlie this “demand ticket,” formulating them as constitutive rules. Then, the interaction of the communicative context and the constitutive rules with a more general set of regulative rules or maxims of conversation is proposed as the mechanism by which people recognize a given utterance as “counting as” a demand ticket.