This article focuses on instructions prefaced with the mental imperative format "tänk på att" (appr. ‘bear in mind that’) in training sessions between personal trainers and their clients. The data consists of five video-recorded training sessions in Swedish from Sweden and Finland. The methodological framework is Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, in combination with a grammatical and Systemic-Functional perspective on instructing action sequences. In the analysis, three "tänk på att"-prefaced instructions are examined in their sequential and interactional contexts, focusing on the participants’ embodied conduct and grammatical details. The results show that personal trainers deploy instructions prefaced with "tänk på" att to correct errors in the clients’ performance and to prevent possible errors in the future. These instructions contribute to the establishment of epistemic and deontic authority in the training sessions, partly owing to their general institutional register function. At the same time, the instructtions also have a pedagogical aim: to teach the clients to perform the instructed physical exercises in a correct way. Consequently, personal trainers also provide explanations for their corrections in a way that increases the clients’ possibilities for learning. Finally, there is a politeness dimension to the complex construction, which initially alerts about a corrective measure but reserves the verbalization of what is to be corrected a late position in the directive utterance.

Peer reviewed