@ ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 23 (1995) 199-226 jouraitl of 'Accounts' in negotiation discourse: A single-case analysis Alan Firth Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Aalborg University, Havrevangen 1, DK-9000 Aalborg, Denmark Received August 1993; revised version December 1993 Abstract The pragmatic and discursive functions of accounts have been the subject of considerable scholarly attention in recent decades. In their seminal paper, Scott and Lyman (1968) define 'accounts' in a retroactive sense, as "statements made to explain unanticipated or untoward behaviour", and it is overridingly in this regard that accounts have been approached in the lit- erature. However, by attending to the way accounts are interactionally deployed in a single commodity negotiation, it is shown that accounts may also be used in a proactive, creative sense. Accounts, it will be argued, do substantially more than 'explain' behaviour and 'repair' fractured social interaction. By providing a vocabulary of (organizational) motives, by reveal- ing putative 'facts' pertaining to market conditions, and by justifying actions, accounts estab- lish a basis from which organizationally relevant action may be identified, challenged, and discussed. Furthermore, it will be shown that 'accounting' is not only a unilateral act but may, at significant junctures in the negotiation, be undertaken multilaterally. This can be seen in the way negotiators 'share' the activity of accounting as a method of intimating agreement. In sum, accounts provide mutually accessible (discourse) resources that allow negotiators to undertake their work effectively, i.e., to reach substantive agreement. This paper is based on chapter 5 of my doctoral dissertation (Firth, 1991). Versions of the paper have been presented at the Rasmus Rask Linguistics Colloquium at Odense University, at the Sociolinguistics Seminar, Indiana University, as a guest lecture at the University of Oregon, and at the 4th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Kobe, Japan. I benefited greatly from the discussions and questions during these presentations. In particular, thanks to Jack Bilmes, Douglas Maynard, Jacob Mey, Gall Jef- ferson and an anonymous reviewer for detailed comments on an earlier version of the paper. I am also grateful to Gail Jefferson for her invaluable assistance with the transcript. I alone take responsibility for the paper's shortcomings. E-mail: firth@hum.auc.dk 0378-2166/95/$09.50 © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(94 )00003 -W