Clark highlights a neglected issue in research on language use: the process by which speakers and addressees anchor utterances with respect to individual entities in their common ground. In his review, he identifies the challenges linked to investigations of anchoring, but also displays the pitfalls of evading it.

This study is concerned with the organisation of gestural phases of non-movement, in particular the prolonged hold and provisional home position, as accountably and in situ produced segments of behaviour. Through fine-grained transcriptions and multimodal analysis of videotaped conversation in natural and everyday settings, it is found that movement phases may be exploited by participants in order to indicate that a pursued trajectory or line of action is maintained, suspended or abandoned. Also, through constant monitoring, participants may adjust the location (...) of non-movement as the interaction unfolds in time. It is argued that various possible locations of non-movement are arranged along a continuum ranging from the space of gesticulation to a relaxed rest position and that these locations reflect various degrees of involvement or claim of speakership in the gesturer. (shrink)

The intelligibility of a performance of improvised dance does not reside in the rehearsed execution of a pre-existing script, nor does it result from a sustained verbal interaction between the dancers. Many aspects of the speechless performance obviously play an important role in the achieved intelligibility of the dance: a dancer is seen moving on and from a ground, on a stage, in a space delimited by walls, illuminated by spotlights, sounded by music, in front of an audience. And of (...) course with other dancers, whose joint gestures and moves give shape to a choreography by providing pace, rhythm and sequences, thereby constituting a narrative or fragments thereof. This paper addresses the manufacture of this witnessable order, by presenting some results of an ethnographic inquiry. The investigation will be focused on how, in an improvised duet, each dancer interacts with the other, and more specifically how she or he positions her- or himself in relation to the other, from distance to proximity and touch. This work of distance management is the dance, whose choreographic accountability is produced and structured by dancers staying at a distance, getting closer and touching each other. The analysis shows that distance management is oriented to as relevant by the dancers and that it has consequences on their improvised duet. It is also what makes their performance analyzable by distant observers. (shrink)

This article discusses the ways in which “walking” in a place that exhibits institutional heritage (albeit is not set as a separate gallery) discloses individuality within institutional/hegemonic intent. Examining photographs taken in a place that,among other activities, comprises institutional heritage, the article adds to the literature by specifying a new mode of walking in heritage “sites.” Walking is regarded a semiotic resource; hence, the article’s insights relate to: (a) arguments in the institution, (b) definitions of “center,” (c) “attractors” in retailing (...) and museums (as places which present heritage), and (d) the architecture of paths. The final section of the article considers heritage ineducationalinstitutions (the specific environment that the article discusses). It relates to the characteristics of classroom talk and offers recommendations for incorporating them in exhibitions dedicated to the heritage of education institutions, as a means to establish teachers’ professional identity. (shrink)

This article explores the principles of interaction that shape grammatical practices of conversational speech cross-linguistically. Seven such principles are explored, and the grammatical practices they give rise to are illustrated. The role of these principles in shaping non-linguistic behavior is also touched on.

This study examines interactions in which students help each other with their learning during classroom instruction, forming groups in the process. From a conversation analytic perspective, helping is assumed to be a sequentially organized activity jointly accomplished by the participants. As an activity that proceeds alongside other ongoing classroom activities, helping can be conceived as part of a multiactivity that poses students with multi-faceted interactional and moral challenges. While previous research on helping in educational contexts has primarily focused on the (...) influence of helping on learning outcomes and social dynamics in helping interactions, the present study investigates how students cope with the intricacies of moral commitments inherent in helping as a concurrent activity. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to elaborate on how students’ dual involvements – i.e., their involvement in classroom activities while simultaneously providing help – manifest in the ways in which groups are constituted, maintained, and dissolved. The analyses reveal that both the compatibility of helping with the activity already in progress as well as the students’ problem definition are consequential for the sequential and bodily-spatial unfolding of the help interaction, inducing different arrangements that constitute a continuum, at each end of which there is a dominant orientation toward the shared space of helping or toward the individual/collective space. Furthermore, from a methodological perspective, our study aims to demonstrate the extent to which multimodal interaction analysis is applicable when examining naturally occurring groups, in this case, in interactive processes of helping. The study is based on a data corpus that comprises video recordings of mathematics and German lessons from two fifth-grade classrooms. (shrink)

The article begins with a sketch of the relation of interaction to language and to culture, and of the students of interaction to the students of language and of culture. A 10-second segment of recorded interaction at a family dinner is then examined in a fashion meant to preserve the integrity1 of what is being done interactionally while incorporating attention to the deployment of various facets of the language that is used, and its relationship to simultaneously ongoing bodily doings. An (...) interactional practice – whining – from that episode is then juxtaposed with the same practice in several other segments of interaction in the interests of developing a more formal, transsituational account. The viability of research focused on phenomena in an analytically distinct domain of events while preserving the integrity of the occasions in which instances of the phenomenon occurred is then reviewed, using a case study of the conjoint use of phonetic analysis and conversation analysis. The article concludes with a reply to Levinson's article in this special issue of the journal, and uses the occasion to sketch the relationship between interaction and so-called ‘macro’ social and cultural formations such as kinship. (shrink)

In a period given to emphasizing diversity among humans, we would do well to explore diversity among forms of discourse and among forms of talk-in-interaction in particular. Among the speech-exchange systems, ordinary conversation has been claimed to be distinctive and fundamental, but questions have been raised about both claims. The resources for discriminating among speech-exchange systems are located in such generic organizations of practice as turn-taking, sequence organization, the organization of repair and the overall structural organization of episodes of interaction. (...) I try to show that `conversation' as a distinctive speech-exchange system is real and is not only a residual category, and that it is to be understood as the `basic' speech-exchange system, in part by reference to the distinctive turn-taking organization through which it is implemented. The `motivation' for having developed a formal account of this turn-taking organization is recounted, and that formal account is defended for its usability in the analytic explication of singular, contexted episodes of talk. The remainder of the article is given over to such an exemplary account - an examination of an episode of interaction during a testing session between a man whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated and a researcher. (shrink)

In this paper, based on video recordings of Orientation and Mobility (O&M) lessons for visually-disabled students, I will examine how occasioned maps (Psathas, 1979 ; Garfinkel, 2002 ), drawn in the student’s palm are interactionally traced, felt, and noticed in order to represent the shape of a crossing for all practical purposes. Touching will be examined from the perspective of the live production of "trails" on a specific region of the body, the palm of the hand. We will begin to (...) question how such hand-drawing map episodes occur during O&M courses, stressing how the coparticipants establish a participation framework that facilitates the making of the drawing, hand-map drawings are based on lines that are neither evanescent nor permanent. Their “persistence” is not an intrinsic feature but a systematic multimodal accomplishment. We will show how the drawn lines become depictions of the streets and contribute to producing two contrasting geometrical representations of the layout of a junction. (shrink)

This research focuses on dinner conversations in family-style group care. Children, who cannot live with their biological families anymore, are given shelter in these family-style group care settings. For the development of an attachment relationship between children and their Professional Foster Parents, it is important that the children feel that they are listened to in order to get an affective and intimate relationship with the parents. In this conversation-analytic research we analysed PFPs’ involvement in multiple activities simultaneously, namely listening and (...) eating, which is referred to as ‘multi-activity’. The analyses have shown systematic ways in which PFPs coordinate their involvement in the activities of ‘doing’ listening and eating, which are when parents avert their gaze from the telling child, they break the social rule which states that hearers need to look at speakers during the telling. We found that when averting their gaze, PFPs do head nods and linguistic means or positioning their bodies in the direction of the telling child. This research contributes to knowledge about interaction between adolescents and PFPs. It further contributes to knowledge about how human beings are able to coordinate multiple activities simultaneously. (shrink)

This article focuses on referential practices at a Japanese midwife house, where at prenatal examinations, a midwife palpates a pregnant woman’s abdomen with her hands, without any assistance from an ultrasound scanner. The midwife often refers to spots on the abdomen in palpation with locative demonstrative expressions. I demonstrate that ways in which references to spots on the pregnant woman’s abdomen are accomplished are subtly different, depending on the action sequence in which they are embedded. The description of referential practices (...) in which the touching plays an important role has consequences for the re-conceptualization of human interaction in general, and interaction between medical professionals and their clients in modern medical settings in particular. (shrink)

Taste is a central sense for humans and animals, and it has been largely studied either from physiological and neurological approaches or from socio-cultural ones. This paper adopts another view, focused on the activity of tasting rather than on the sense of taste, approached within the perspective of ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis. This view addresses the activity of tasting as it is interactionally organized in specific social settings, observed in a naturalistic way, on the basis of video recordings. Focusing (...) on video recorded improvised tastings of cheese in gourmet shop encounters, the paper offers a systematic analysis of the way in which tasting is orderly achieved in an intersubjective way. It follows the various steps characterizing tasting, from the invitation to taste, to the grasping of a bit to taste, which is put in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed; it details how an interactional moment offering the taster a priviledged, individual, focused space in which to devote exclusive attention to the object tasted is actively tailored by all parties. By contrast, the completion of tasting is marked by a return to mutual gaze, the animation of facial expressions and nods, and the final production of a judgment of taste. By offering a systematic reconstruction of how these tasting moments are organized, the paper invites to a multimodal approach of sensoriality in social interaction. (shrink)

Sensorial access to products in shop encounters constitutes a crucial aspect of the appeal to customers. This paper examines sensorial engagements with products in a specific ecology with a focus on the possible opening of a shop encounter. When passers-by stroll from one stand to another, open to local findings, unplanned discoveries, and emergent opportunities to buy, they orient to the sensory appeal of the products, becoming possible customers, stopping in front of a counter and engaging in a social interaction (...) with sellers and other customers. The analysis focuses on multisensoriality in action, studying how customers and sellers treat the sensorial qualities of the products, the relevance of the sensory engagement of the customer with their materiality, and their involvement in the social encounter with the seller, including normative expectations related to sensing and buying. It includes a discussion of how under Covid-19 sensorial access to products was restricted and the sensorial, interactional, normative, and economic consequences of these restrictions. Based on video recordings of market encounters, and on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach of multimodality and multisensoriality, the paper reflects on how appealing to the senses of sight, touch, smell, and taste is methodically orchestrated, and its consequences for the interaction with the seller, the sensorial experience, and the economic transaction. (shrink)

For some customers, the corona pandemic has turned e-shopping into a fine alternative to shopping in brick-and-mortar shops. For other customers in quarantine e-shopping is the only alternative. The long-lasting pandemic, however, has reminded us of the importance of social contacts and interactions – even if it’s just to go the supermarket to ‘mingle’. This paper investigates what ‘mingle’ means when shopping in physical self-service shops amongst unacquainted others in Denmark. It describes customers’ practice of doing self-service by organizing interaction (...) to minimize social involvement. It shows how they, as a matter of fact, co-ordinate their conduct in ways that hampers possibilities for engaging in even small ‘ritual’ exchanges of talk. The paper draws upon a corpus of video recordings of customers’ self-service practices in shops in Denmark. In addition, the customers’ gaze was recorded with the mobile Tobii Pro X3 eye tracker. The study falls within the realm of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies of multimodal interaction. It concludes that self-service is achieved through co-present customers’ tacit coordination of multimodal actions in social interaction and that their practices work to achieve ‘effortlessly’ and ‘spontaneously’ being, getting, and staying out of the way, which seems to be an ideal for self-service shopping. Talk and moreover having a conversation seems to be an impediment to it. (shrink)

Gaze is a central mechanism for the entry into and coordination of face-to-face interaction. As such, persistent and sustained gaze withdrawal may indicate significant troubles in an interaction. This article examines how two police officers, in seeking to calm a hysterical woman whose grandson has been shot, treat her refusal to gaze at them as a central component of her persisting hysteria. Toward the end of getting the woman to calm down, one officer seeks her return gaze using embedded and (...) exposed methods of gaze pursuit. These methods work on a continuum in which, at one end, a turn at talk can be preserved as the main activity, while at the other end, the main activity becomes remedying the interactional trouble. These methods address different interactional relevancies having to do with 1) being a listener to a speaker, 2) being a recipient of a directive action, and 3) a basic obligation to comport oneself as at least minimally aware and responsive when targeted by the actions of co-present others. (shrink)

The transitions between turns at talk in conversation tend to occur quickly, with only a slight gap of approximately 100 to 300 ms between them. This estimate of central tendency, however, hides a wealth of complex variation, as a number of factors, such as the type of turns involved, have been shown to influence the timing of turn transitions. This article considers one specific type of turn that does not conform to the statistical trend, namely turns that deal with troubles (...) of speaking, hearing, and understanding, known as other-initiations of repair. The results of a quantitative analysis of 169 other-initiations of repair in face-to-face conversation reveal that the most frequent cases occur after gaps of approximately 700 ms. Furthermore, other-initiations of repair that locate a source of trouble in a prior turn specifically tend to occur after shorter gaps than those that do not, and those that correct errors in a prior turn, while rare, tend to occur without delay. An analysis of the transitions before other-initiations of repair, using methods of conversation analysis, suggests that speakers use the extra time (i) to search for a late recognition of the problematic turn, (ii) to provide an opportunity for the speaker of the problematic turn to resolve the trouble independently, (iii) and to produce visual signals, such as facial gestures. In light of these results, it is argued that other-initiations of repair take priority over other turns at talk in conversation and therefore are not subject to the same rules and constraints that motivate fast turn transitions in general. (shrink)

This paper examines an intersection between ecological psychology and the enactive approach, brought about by studying sense-making in relation to a behavior setting in Hong Kong and adopting a focus on embodied action and gesture. A cosmetics pop-up store in a downtown shopping mall provides the basis for a case study involving a two pronged analysis. I first use Barker’s behavior setting theory to describe the publically accessible structure and dynamics of the store, which reveals a bounded spatio-temporal structure with (...) several interdependent behavior-milieu parts. I then analyze video recordings of my research participant encountering, entering, and exploring this environment. Following an enactive-informed micro-ethnographic approach to embodied communication, I examine her movements, postures, gestures, and language use as she joins the behavior setting. These fine-grained descriptions of her embodied actions provide an empirical basis to analyze enactive sense-making. On the one hand, they disclose the affective and emotional experience of perceiving relevant affordances in the environment, and on the other hand, they show the specificity of sensorimotor abilities required to join the setting’s standing pattern of behavior. (shrink)

Previous research in the social sciences has shown that haptic interaction rituals are critical for maintaining social relationships. However, during the coronavirus pandemic, ‘social distancing’ was encouraged in order to avoid the spread of disease. Drawing on data from self-ethnography as well as publicly available resources, in this study we explore some new, locally negotiated haptic trajectories to accomplish interaction rituals in the time of coronavirus. First, we present self-ethnographic observations of distancing in face-to-face encounters from our everyday lives. Second, (...) utilizing methods of microanalysis of naturally occurring interaction, we investigate video recordings of the embodied negotiation of space and touch among politicians. We analyze three different ways in which politicians negotiate transitional moves in this haptic ritual when one party initiates a handshake: repairing, declining and apologizing. Our analysis shows that politicians adapt their entire bodies in conjunction with talk, gestures and laughter not only to accomplish the greeting but also to remedy the potentially face-threatening situation of not getting the greeting right. This research has implications for better understanding the spontaneous ability of human beings to invent new ways of engaging with each other. Moreover, it adds to our knowledge of how the materiality of human bodies can impact forms of sociality. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 1-42.

This article presents a study of how co-present individuals work out the nature of embodied engagement and disengagement displays by individuals with dementia in a Danish public care facility. Research has found that moderate to severe dementia may result, for example, in a lack of social engagement, apathy and problems in maintaining conversations. Research has, however, also found that co-present individuals indicate their right to unavailability for social interaction. This is accomplished through details of embodied and multimodal conduct such as (...) gaze behavior, which includes practices of glancing and gazing at co-present individuals or practices of gazing into space. These practices may coincide with indications of ‘lack of social engagement’ and ‘apathy’. This study falls within the framework of ethnomethodology and employs multimodal conversation analytic methods to show how co-present individuals monitor residents’ displays of engagement and disengagement, primarily gaze behavior and how they respond to them. The study is based on 20 hours of video-recordings. (shrink)