The recruitment system in Italian

This chapter describes the resources that speakers of Italian use when recruiting
assistance and collaboration from others in everyday social interaction. The chapter
draws on data from video recordings of informal conversation in Italian, 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). This chapter extends our knowledge of the structure
and usage of Italian with detailed attention to the properties of sequential structure
in conversational interaction. The chapter is a contribution to an emerging field of
pragmatic typology.