ABSTRACT
These utterances were taken from recordings made in a New Zealand factory (Brown 2000). They are instructions given by a factory manager to members of his staff and can be labelled ‘directives’, or ‘control acts’, speech acts intended to get someone to do something.2 They are all imperative in structure, the canonical form of a directive, and they are direct and explicit. Despite this, the actions they prescribe are largely opaque to a reader, since the utterances include exophoric and anaphoric references to people and things that are clear only in the context in which they were produced (e.g. them, it, him). The absence of contextual information also prevents an outsider knowing how ‘normal’ such direct instructions are, whether they reflect familiarity between the participants, or whether they are instantia tions of explicit managerial authority.
