Getting others to do things in the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Cha'palaa use when recruiting assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Cha'palaa, and reports language-specific findings generated within a large-scale comparative project involving eight languages from five continents (see other chapters of this volume). The resources for recruitment described in this chapter include linguistic structures from across the levels of grammatical organization, as well as gestural and other visible and contextual resources of relevance to the interpretation of action in interaction. The presentation of categories of recruitment, and elements of recruitment sequences, follows the coding scheme used in the comparative project (see Chapter 2 of the volume). The present chapter extends our knowledge of the structure and usage of the Cha'palaa language with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of pragmatic typology.