Proposals for Activity Collaboration

This article examines two common ways that speakers propose a new joint activity—“Let’s X” and “How about X”—in an examination of video recordings of children playing. Whereas Let’s constructions treat the proposed activity as disjunctive with the prior, How about constructions treat the proposed activity as modifying the ongoing activity. We rely on distributional as well as turn-design evidence including phonetic and bodily resources of turn design. We also analyze deviant cases where we argue that speakers are working to either increase or decrease the distance between the new activity and the prior activity. Data are in Canadian English.