Opening Interactions Between Inquirers and Employees in Jordanian Public Utility Services

This article investigates the strategic sequential options used to open a real workplace discourse in public utilities between Jordanian inquirers and employees. We examined how these opening moves are co-constructed and function, what linguistic choices are utilized to articulate these moves, and how they reflect socio-cultural relations between the interlocutors. The data reported here were drawn from seven employees and 100 Jordanian inquirers recruited from those approaching the organization and the employees responding to face-to-face inquiries. To achieve this, we adopted Al-Ali and Abu-Abah’s (2021) sequential moves observed in Jordanians’ telephone conversation openings. The moves identified in the data analyzed can be categorized into three groups: cross-culture-free phatic components (Greeting, Question-After-You (QAY)), socio-culture-bound components (Expressing hospitality, Invoking God-wishes, and Introducing oneself), and context-bound components (Expressing annoyance, and Topic introducer). Contextual and socio-cultural practices of Arabic speakers result in new moves that have led to a delayed switch to the core topic. Such a practice can be related to relationships in Arab culture established upon collectivism and indirectness that focus on rapport-building exchanges. Such findings will, hopefully, contribute to understanding how interlocutors use socio-cultural and religious affiliations to co-construct the components of this genre.