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There has been a long-standing interest in projection and the resources on which participants rely to produce and recognize the import and organization of turns at talk. Less attention has been paid to the character of the activity in which utterances form part and the ways in which embodied action enables the intelligibility, coordination, and in some cases, coproduction, of particular actions. In this article, we focus on specialized forms of embodied, institutional activity and focus in particular on simultaneity and the ways in which bodily action enables the progressive formation and reformation of an activity in the light of the (co)participants’ emerging contributions. We address how the routine structure of particular tasks enables participants to anticipate, prepare for, and even initiate actions in advance of the relevant activity and in turn, how participants may seek to ameliorate the interactional import of potentially premature action. The articles explores the interplay of technical practice and interactional organization and points to the distinctive character of embodied action in understanding anticipation and coordination in complex forms of institutional interaction.
The human ability to anticipate upcoming behavior not only enables smooth turn transitions but also makes early responses possible, as respondents use a variety of cues that provide for early projection of the type of action that is being performed. This article examines resources for projection in interaction in three unrelated languages—Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin—in sequences where speakers make evaluative assertions on a topic. The focus is on independently agreeing responses initiated in early overlap. Our cross-linguistic analysis reveals that while projection based on the ongoing turn-constructional unit relies on language-specific grammatical constructions, projection based on the larger context seems to be less language-dependent. A crucial finding is that in the target sequences, stances taken toward the topic already during earlier talk, as well as other structural patterns, are among the resources that recipients use for projecting how and when the ongoing turn will end.
This article explores the relation between word order and response latency, focusing on responses to question-word questions. Qualitative (multimodal) and quantitative analyses of naturally occurring conversations in French—where question-words can occur in initial, medial, or final position within the question—show that variation in word order affects the timing of responses. It is argued that this is so because word order provides a differential basis for action ascription, creating different temporal opportunities for projecting the recipient’s next relevant action. The frequent occurrence of early responses to questions with an initial question-word, in particular, stresses the importance of the recognition point of an action under way for response timing and shows respondents’ pervasive orientation to sequential progressivity. Findings highlight how lexico-syntactic trajectories of emergent turns, prior talk and actions, material and bodily features of interaction, and participants’ shared expectations conspire in shaping the time-courses of action ascription and action projection.
This study examines head nods produced as embodied and silent answers to polar questions before a transition relevance place has been reached. It discusses the notion of “response” and the ways in which the literature conceptualizes head nods. The analysis of video recordings of ordinary and institutional multiparty interactions shows that answer-nods rely on mutual gaze and that affirmative head nods may co-occur with other facial expressions (e.g., eye blinks). By replying with a silent head nod, respondents may complete an unfolding adjacency pair without claiming speakership, thereby enabling the questioner to extend their turn-in-progress. Alternatively, respondents may expand their answer-nod with talk, in which case silent nodding may contribute to organizing the smooth transition of turns-at-talk. Head nods produced while a question is unfolding are described as a microsequential phenomenon that may affect the questioner’s turn-in-progress. Data are in French and Italian.
Focusing on request sequences, this article explores dynamics of projection and anticipation, enabling participants to produce early responses to requests. In particular, the analyses highlight the importance of multimodal formatting and the specific temporalities of multiple multimodal resources for the emergence of projections and the possibility to anticipate an ongoing action. Moreover, the analyses pinpoint the relevance of the local ecology and the praxeological context for the participants, enabling them to anticipate the next relevant action. These features characterizing the temporality of multimodal Gestalts, the relevance of the local ecology, and the details of the praxeological context make it possible for participants to produce very early responses and also to accomplish an action even before it has been actually requested.
This special issue investigates early responses—responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still under way. Although timing in human conduct has gained intense interest in research, the early production of responsive actions has so far largely remained unexplored. But what makes early responses possible? What do such responses tell us about the complex interplay between syntax, prosody, and embodied conduct? And what sorts of actions do participants accomplish by means of such early responses? By addressing these questions, the special issue seeks to offer new advances in the systematic analysis of temporal organization in interaction, contributing to broader discussions in the language and cognitive sciences as to the social coordination of human conduct.
In this article, we provide longitudinal evidence for the progressive routinization of a grammatical construction used for social coordination purposes in a highly specialized activity context: task-oriented video-mediated interactions. We focus on the methodic ways in which, over the course of 4 years, a second language speaker and initially novice to such interactions coordinates the transition between interacting with her coparticipants and consulting her own screen, which suspends talk, without creating trouble due to halts in progressivity. Initially drawing on diverse resources, she increasingly resorts to the use of a prospective alert constructed around the verb to check (e.g., “I will check”), which eventually routinizes in the lexically specific form “let me check” as a highly context- and activity-bound social action format. We discuss how such change over the participant’s video-mediated interactional history contributes to our understanding of social coordination in video-mediated interaction and of participants’ recalibrating their grammar-for-interaction while adapting to new situations, languages, or media. Data are in English.
This study documents change over time and across proficiency levels in French second-language (L2) speakers’ practices for initiating complaints. Prior research has shown that speakers typically initiate complaints in a stepwise manner that indexes the contingent, moral, and delicate nature of the activity. Although elementary speakers in my data often launch complaint sequences in a straightforward way, they sometimes embodiedly foreshadow verbal expressions of negative stance or delay negative talk through brief positively valenced prefaces. More advanced speakers in part rely on the same initiation practices as elementary speakers. In addition, they recurrently use extensive prefatory work that accounts for and legitimizes the upcoming complaint, and they regularly initiate complaints jointly with coparticipants through a progressive escalation of negative stance expressions. I document interactional resources involved in this change and discuss the findings in terms of speakers’ development of L2 interactional competence. Data are in French with English translations.
We reflect on the affordances and challenges of interactional data in the analysis of long-term institutional change. To this end we draw on our studies of direct encounters between journalists and politicians in news interviews and presidential news conferences and in particular the use of question design as a window into the evolution of journalistic norms and press-state relations over time and the causal antecedents of such change. All analyses that incorporate a concern with environing contexts of interactional change impose certain burdens of empirical demonstration on the researcher. Here we consider three analytic issues that arise in the kind of historical-institutional analysis we have been pursuing: (a) controlling for the situational context, (b) pinpointing the locus of change, and (c) validating indicators of change. Data are in English.
Based on longitudinal audiovisual data from family interactions, we focus on how young children between 1;08 and 2;10 report trouble they are encountering in their current activity using the response cry oh in combination with other lexical items (e.g., “oh fell off”) and bodily displays. While at a very young age the children remain focused on their activity and try to solve the problem independently, at an older age they start to systematically use gaze directed toward the parent and suspension of the current activity to enlist the adult’s assistance. We argue that these bodily displays are among the resources whose presence or absence constrains whether the report of trouble leads to the recruitment of assistance or not. Regarding the developmental implications, it seems that during their third year of life, young children expand their repertoire for dealing with trouble interactively. Data are in German with English translations.