The management of grantings and rejections by parents in request sequences

Recent work on requests has been largely concerned with how they are identified as such by a hearer,' and there now appears to be some consensus that any account of that will need to make reference to various beliefs that a hearer has concerning the speaker. Less attention has been paid to the organization of speaker turns after requests, but a virtue of the speech act approach to request organization is the symmetry that exists between the ways that requests are turned down and the belief conditions that underpin sincere requests. Labov and Fanshel (1-977: 86-88), for example, argue that most requests are turned down indirectly rather than through absolute refusals, and that this is achieved by hearers making assertions or requests for information concerning the relevant belief conditions. So if A makes a request to B, say Would you dust the room! (to use their example) then B could 'put off the request by addressing the