“Not for the purpose of making a speech:” Andrew Johnson's swing around the circle

Discourse analytic research has treated the communicative and sequential properties of conversational influence attempts (CIAs) independently. This study assembles evidence that the communicative properties of a variety of act‐types in CIA episodes can be placed on a continuum according to the degree to which the act‐type is dissociated from the illocutionary force of a request. Conversationalists’ assignment of any utterance to a place on this continuum is inherently problematic, being a matter of fallible assessment of mutual contextual knowledge. This continuum and its problematic application in conversation provides an integrated account of a variety of previously fragmented sequential patterns of CIAs.