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.

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 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.