Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.

By examining sequences in which families consisting of parents and their children make decisions on what to purchase while grocery shopping, this chapter explores how an incongruence between the deontic stance expressed through a speaker’s utterance and the deontic status ordinarily associated with that speaker provides resources for the recipients’ action ascription. Our data show that when the father and the children initiate a decision-making sequence, they are commonly treated by the mother as having less rights to decide what to purchase, while the mother is regularly treated by the father (and the children) as having stronger rights concerning purchase decision making. From this observation, we argue that the father and the children are ordinarily associated with a weaker deontic status with regard to purchase decision making while the mother is associated with a stronger deontic status. Sometimes, however, the father and the children use a grammatical format that indexes a deontic stance that is not consistent with their weaker deontic status. We demonstrate that this incongruence between deontic stance and deontic status provides resources for the mother to respond in such a way as to display her inference about the action performed by the father or the children.

My starting point is that certain actions are ‘valued’ over others, in ways that are not restricted to pairs of possible actions (therefore not restricted to adjacency pairs). For instance, it may be regarded in certain corporate and political worlds as better to have ‘resigned’ than to have been fired. The micro-politics of social action is evident in the manoeuvres by which participants implement or avoid certain actions, always remembering that the relative value of an action is a situated attribute. I consider some of the systematic ways in which participants ‘position’ themselves with respect to certain action environments. From among the varied ways participants manoeuvre and position themselves regarding implementing and avoiding action, three stand out: (i) avoiding taking an action, in such a way that the other responds as though the (absent action) implication had been performed (other’s ascription to self of an action self might have been avoiding); (ii) disguising an action, through (mis)attributing to one’s own speech an action which may differ from the action that is thereby implemented (self-ascription); and (iii) treating a prior turn/action as having been what it was not officially designed to be/do (denying, disclaiming, ‘misattributing’ actions) (other-ascription).

Taking conversation analysis as its research method, this study investigates the interactional import of the turn-final particle ya in answers to questions in Mandarin conversations. Parasitic on answers to questions, the particle ya is not a syntactically and semantically required component of the turn. The interactional role played by the particle ya in this sequential position is to ascribe collateral effects to or the specific property of the action ascribed, namely, questioning. Specifically speaking, the particle ya does the work of assessment. It is a practice of assessing the prior question as being inapposite, inappropriate or problematic in terms of its presupposition or moral judgement. At the same time, in terms of displaying affect, the particle ya is also a practice of expressing annoyance by the answerer. More generally, this study draws researchers’ attention to the investigation of affect display and action assessment by means of turn-design.

This introductory chapter lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for the rest of the monograph. It begins by introducing the topic of obesity and by reviewing existing (linguistic) research on it. It then introduces the context of the UK news media in detail. Finally, the chapter introduces the corpus of obesity newspaper articles assembled for this study and the methodological approach we use to analyse this data, which combines corpus linguistics with critical discourse studies.

Having explored the representation of obesity in the press from a range of methodological and thematic perspectives in the previous chapters, this final analytical chapter focuses on how such representations are received by readers. This chapter describes the construction and analysis of the reader comments accompanying a sample of articles about obesity published on the most-visited online newspaper in the UK – the MailOnline. By comparing these comments to their corresponding articles, the analysis demonstrates how the readers’ comments tend, in the main, to go further than the articles in the extent to which they stigmatise and shame people with obesity, thereby offering more negative and extreme takes on the obesity-related stories being reported. Yet, at the same time, the analysis also shows the ways in which readers can challenge the original articles and, indeed, other commenters, through comments which offer counter discourses to the dominant shaming ones.

This chapter examines the use of language and discourse that shames and stigmatises people with obesity and, conversely, that which could be viewed as reclaiming the concept, such as through fat acceptance and body positivity. In particular, the analysis focuses on how people with obesity are named, the characteristics that are attributed to them and the actions that they are represented as performing. This chapter also explores a theme that sits slightly outside of these foci but which emerged during the analysis; that of the ‘obese criminal’.

This chapter commences our analysis by using the keywords approach to explore uses of language (and, by extension, representations) that are characteristic of all sections of the British press when reporting on the topic of obesity. We divide our corpus into four sections according to newspapers’ format and political leaning. These four sections are left-leaning broadsheets, left-leaning tabloids, right-leaning broadsheets and right-leaning tabloids. The analysis in this chapter focuses on words that were key across all these sections (i.e. ‘shared’ keywords) and so provide an inductive ‘way in’ for exploring representations of obesity that are pervasive across the press.