0100497752

open access

Accepted Manuscript

Recruitment During Table-Cooked Meals: Foregrounding and Backgrounding Offers and Acts of Assistance Within Multi-Party Talk

English (英語)

East Asian Pragmatics

10(2)

162-185

University of Toronto Press

2025-06-30

2026-06-30

At Japanese yakiniku-style restaurants, customers grill meat at the table and then often offer it to each other. Such offers are a form of recruitment—the outcome of various interactional methods for eliciting or soliciting involvement. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, this study focuses on sequences of lingua franca English talk between three Japanese people and their French guest in one such restaurant setting. The analysis explores dual involvements in which food-related offers are interactionally backgrounded in deference to primary talk about other topics. The cooking party times their offers to gaps in the primary talk, sometimes delaying the offer to insert it at a sequentially favorable juncture to better mobilize acceptance from the recipient. The study provides insight into the integrated roles of temporality, embodiment, materiality, and participation in the mundane, yet finely coordinated, accomplishment of attentiveness to the needs of others during table-cooked meals.

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