Making a Mistake, or Cheating: Two Sequential Trajectories in Corrections of Rule Violations

Abstract

What happens when a player in a game makes a move that may violate a basic rule? We address this question by analyzing amateur pétanque play, in which participants, from the same throwing position, try to land their throwing balls as close as possible to a target ball. We examine what happens when someone stands in the “wrong” place to throw, and find two distinct sequential trajectories that this projectable violation occasions: (a) The complainant uses a minimal correction format (with address terms, pointing gestures, and indexical expressions), treating the mispositioning as a mistake; (b) the complainant solicits an account for the mispositioning (with a why-interrogative format that attributes knowledge and intentionality to the player), which leads to the accusation of cheating. Data include video recordings of naturally occurring game play, and the participants use English as a lingua franca, although they sometimes resort to Swiss German, French, and Portuguese.