Initiating actions, such as the introduction of a topic or the initiation of a sequence in a conversation, are social accomplishments. The study focuses on the Estonian no(h)-preface in turns that initiate action sequences and often also a locally new topic in a human encounter. It argues that these no(h)-prefaced turns accomplish continuity beyond the current event and thereby index a long-term involvement between the participants. By marking the turn as warranted by an earlier action trajectory, the no(h)-preface contributes to achieving continuity of action across intervening sequences and encounters. The data come from 70 hours of recordings primarily of phone calls.
This paper looks at the coordination of vocal and bodily behavior in the multilayered activity of dance teaching, where teachers simultaneously explain and perform. The aim is to show how talk is adjusted to the rhythm and character of the dance on the one hand, and how dance is fitted into the evolving grammar on the other. The study focuses on the emergence of specialized grammar that is capable of incorporating embodied demonstrations. The temporalities of talk and dance are mutually adjusted and intertwined in the teachersí actions, resulting in inherently multimodal patterns of sense-making that are applied for various instructive and other social tasks. Calling into question the analytic boundary between grammar and the body, the paper argues that projection cross-cuts modalities.
This paper looks at how immaterial objects are manipulated into being for pedagogical purposes. Dance teachers employ objects to visualize subtle tactile and kinaesthetic experiences. The objects emerge in a situated manner within activity metaphors where alternative bodily activities are juxtaposed with the dance movement, taking for granted that these alternative activities are tacitly known or more basic. The objects have a temporally limited existence within activity metaphors that involve verbal explanations as well as embodied demonstrations of both the dance and the alternative activity. Furthermore, participants are shown to orient differently to mere object-implying gestures as opposed to fully-fledged whole-body enactments. In the latter, objects may be maintained collectively across time.
How do people use language, gestures and the materialenvironment around themfor interacting in mobile situations? Interaction and Mobility brings together international scholars who use video-recordings from real-life everyday settings to study how people interact in diverse mobile situations as part of activities such as walking, driving, flying, dancing and gaming. This book isvaluablefor anyone interested in multimodal interaction and mobility.
The study focuses on turns in interaction that involve a bodily-vocal demonstration: an embodied demonstration that is accompanied by a non-lexical vocalization. It shows how the temporal organization of these demonstrations contributes to participant treatment of them as a part of a turn-constructional unit, mostly as its completion. It is also suggested that a bodily-vocal demonstration may function as a separate turn-constructional unit, with a transition relevance point before it, and other participants refraining from action before its completion. Vocalizations, occasionally with coherent pitch contours of intonation units, are argued to render bodily displays vocal space within turns-at-talk. After a bodily-vocal demonstration, the turn-constructional unit can be recompleted with verbal devices, displaying further similarity to verbal-only turns. The analysis calls into attention the relevance of embodied behavior to the emergence of units in conversation.
The paper studies the Estonian three-way phonological quantity distinction by the second generation Swedish Estonians. Production of the three phonological quantities has been measured in the informal interviews with four speakers, all active members of the Estonian exile community. Comparisons with native Estonians show that three of the four Swedish Estonians had retained the length difference between quantity 2 and 3 in all disyllabic word types. All four displayed native-like pitch contours while two were somewhat inconsistent. The same speakers and four additional ones were then tested for perception of the quantities with re-synthesized speech stimuli. For Estonians in Estonia the temporal cue and the pitch cue are effective in combination, while the Swedish Estonian group shows extensive variability. Some speakers only display the effect of the temporal cue, similarly to fluent Estonian L2 speakers. Others have reduced the three-way system to a binary one. In this pilot study we can thus observe either incomplete acquisition in a foreign environment or language attrition in the first Swedish-born generation.
Units in interaction are emergent real-time phenomena that can be accomplished by the coordinated deployment of language and the body. Focusing mostly on data from dance classes, this study looks at how incomplete syntax projects a continuation realized by the body, and systematically accounts for clausal syntax that can incorporate an embodied demonstration. It is argued that the classic list of types of turn-constructional units by Sacks et al. (1974) needs to be expanded with a syntactic-bodily one, and that the syntax of embodied demonstrations has to be included in the grammatical description of language.
Conversation analysis has established that the smooth progression of interaction and the accomplishment of action rest on joint understanding, which is implicitly built by a next turn of talk. In this article we examine explicit claims to intersubjective understanding from a range of settings from the institutional to the mundane. Our target expressions have the general form; I + understand + YOU + PSYCHOLOGICAL FORMULATION such as I understand your concern and I see that this is frustrating you. We propose these expressions do pro forma affiliationthat is, they make a show of affiliating, even if in fact there is no affiliation. By explicitly claiming and demonstrating an understanding of the other speakers subjectivity, our target expression orients to misalignment between the parties, makes a show of other-attentiveness and bridges a shift that advances a speakers interactional agenda. Our contribution is to show the strategic function of a previously undocumented pro-social grammatical-conversational structure. Data are in English, and in Estonian and Swedish with English translation.