It is widely accepted in pragmatics that one of the key things accomplished through language in interaction is the delivery of actions. However, there is much less agreement as to how we might best theorise action vis-à-vis both what is said and what is left unsaid. While the focus in pragmatics was initially on speech acts, speech act theory has subsequently been critiqued for reducing an account of social action to the illocutionary intentions of speakers and for neglecting those actions (...) that are not immediately salient in folk discourse. Pragmatic act theory offers a promising alternative to speech act theory in that it situates the analysis of action within discursive interaction. In this chapter, I consider the way in which pragmatic act theory can usefully inform the analysis of a set of inter-related social actions that comes under the umbrella of what might be termed “prompting”. Prompting social action involves one participant inviting another participant to initiate some kind of social action sequence, thereby avoiding accountability for having launched the social action in question. After discussing examples of the wide range of social actions that can be embedded within a prompting frame, with a particular focus on instances where invitations and proposals are prompted, I suggest that prompting social action more generally constitutes a higher-order pragmatic act. (shrink)