This contribution investigates the use of the Czech particle jako in naturally occurring conversations. Inspired by interactional research on unfinished or suspended utterances and on turn-final conjunctions and particles, the analysis aims to trace the possible development of jako from conjunction to a tag-like particle that can be exploited for mobilizing affiliative responses. Traditionally, jako has been described as conjunction used for comparing two elements or for providing a specification of a first element [“X like Y”]. In spoken Czech, however, (...) jako can be flexibly positioned within a speaking turn and does not seem to operate as a coordinating or hypotactic conjunction. As a result, prior studies have described jako as a polyfunctional particle. This article will try to shed light on the meaning of jako in spoken discourse by focusing on its apparent fuzzy or “filler” uses, i.e., when it is found in a mid-turn position in multi-unit turns and in the immediate vicinity of hesitations, pauses, and turn suspensions. Based on examples from mundane, video-recorded conversations and on a sequential and multimodal approach to social interaction, the analyses will first show that jako frequently frames discursive objects that co-participants should respond to. By using jako before a pause and concurrently adopting specific embodied displays, participants can more explicitly seek to mobilize responsive action. Moreover, as jako tends to cluster in multi-unit turns involving the formulation of subjective experience or stance, it can be shown to be specifically designed for mobilizing affiliative responses. Finally, it will be argued that the potential of jako to open up interactive turn spaces can be linked to the fundamental comparative semantics of the original conjunction. (shrink)

There is plenty of evidence that speech and gesture form a tightly integrated system, as reflected in parallelisms in language production, comprehension, and development ( McNeill, 1992 ; Kendon, 2004 ). Yet, it is a common assumption that speakers use gestures to compensate for their expressive difficulties, a notion found in developmental studies of both first and second language acquisition, and in theoretical proposals concerning the gesture-speech relationship. If gestures are compensatory, they should mainly occur in disfluent stretches of speech. (...) However, the evidence is sparse and conflicting. This study extends previous studies and tests the putative compensatory role of gestures by comparing the gestural behavior in fluent vs. disfluent stretches of narratives by competent speakers in two languages (Dutch and Italian), and by language learners (children and adult L2 learners). The results reveal that (1) in all groups speakers overwhelmingly produce gestures during fluent speech and only rarely during disfluencies. However, L2 learners are significantly more likely to gesture in disfluency than the other groups; (2) in all groups gestures during disfluencies tend to be holds; (3) in all groups the rare gestures completed in disfluencies have both referential and pragmatic functions. Overall, the data strongly suggest that when speech stops, so does gesture. The findings constitute an important challenge to both gesture and language acquisition theories assuming a mainly (lexical) compensatory role for (referential) gestures. Instead, the results provide strong support for the notion that speech and gestures form an integrated system. (shrink)

Albert and De Ruiter provide an introduction to the Conversation Analytic approach to ‘repair’: the ways in which people detect and deal with troubles in speaking, hearing and understanding in conversation. They explain the basic turn‐taking structures involved, provide examples, explain recent developments in the field and highlight some important points of contact and contrast with work in the Cognitive Sciences.

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 investigates how talk and practical action are coordinated during one type of activity involving professional communication: the service-­assessment sequence in hair salons. During this activity, a practical inspection of the haircut must be coupled with sequentially produced verbal acts. Our analysis of four examples reveals that there is no fixed relationship between the organization of talk and practical action. Instead, people manipulate this relationship on a moment-by-moment basis, often coordinating the two into a single, integral package, or relying (...) on one stream of action to achieve progress in the other. These findings imply that some multimodal activities that are brought into alignment may have their own, separate and independent procedural logic and sequencing patterns and that these can be brought into play to create or deal with constraints in each other. (shrink)

The present study aims to explore the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers by taking into account their accompanying visual and gestural behavior. This aspect has not yet been widely explored, and the current study breaks new ground by demonstrating that the analysis of gaze and gesture can shed substantial light on the pragmatic functions of filled pauses and other pausing phenomena. Filled pauses (FPs) serve several pragmatic functions in speech, mainly planning but also turn-holding and emphasis, and their (...) use is also highly determined by register and setting. This research explores the different pragmatic functions of FPs by analyzing their distribution in two different communication settings (conversation vs presentation setting), combining a quantitative and a qualitative methodology, following Kosmala & Crible’s (2021) study on the same data. Particular attention was paid to the co-occurring gestural activity of uh/ums and gaze behavior. Analyses show that the pragmatic functions of FPs are also embodied in kinetic activities which differ according to the setting: more pragmatic and referential ones were found during FPs in conversation than in the presentation setting, as well as more eye-contact, which reflects their potential communicative role during interactional sequences. (shrink)

Storytelling pivots around stance seen as a window unto emotion: storytellers project a stance expressing their emotion toward the events and recipients preferably mirror that stance by affiliating with the storyteller’s stance. Whether the recipient’s affiliative stance is at the same time expressive of his/her emotional resonance with the storyteller and of emotional contagion is a question that has recently attracted intriguing research in Physiological Interaction Research. Connecting to this line of inquiry, this paper concerns itself with storytellings of sadness/distress. (...) Its aim is to identify factors that facilitate emotion contagion in storytellings of sadness/distress and factors that impede it. Given the complexity and novelty of this question, this study is designed as a pilot study to scour the terrain and sketch out an interim roadmap before a larger study is undertaken. The data base is small, comprising two storytellings of sadness/distress. The methodology used to address the above research question is expansive: it includes CA methods to transcribe and analyze interactionally relevant aspects of the storytelling interaction; it draws on psychophysiological measures to establish whether and to what degree emotional resonance between co-participants is achieved. In discussing possible reasons why resonance is (not or not fully) achieved, the paper embarks on an extended analysis of the storytellers’ multimodal storytelling performance (reenactments, prosody, gaze, gesture) and considers factors lying beyond the storyteller’s control, including relevance, participation framework, personality, and susceptibility to emotion contagion. (shrink)

Irregular self-selection is a demonstration of active involvement in interaction. English as a foreign language learners’ talk-in-interaction is one of such cases. Yet, little research has explored when, how, and why learners implement this action. The aim of this article is to address these issues in Chinese postgraduate EFL learners’ conversations from the perspective of multimodal interaction. To this end, we provide descriptive statistics and use multimodal conversation analysis to investigate the detailed process of irregular self-selection. The results show the (...) interactional sensitivity of learners, and all the successful irregular self-selection can be divided into the following three types: turn interruption, turn competition TC), and turn holding abortion. Learners implement this action by using multimodal resources, including lexis, syntax, pitch reset, intensity enhancement, gaze, and so forth. However, their body movements lack diversity, causing behaviors to be constrained and inactive. The main purpose of irregular self-selection is to provide knowledge that contributes to topical development. This study reveals that Chinese postgraduate EFL learners are interactionally competent members. They are able to achieve communicative goals but in a low diversity of body movements. The findings help to understand the detailed process of speakership claiming in EFL learners’ conversations. (shrink)

The framework of depicting put forward byClark (2016)offers a schematic vantage point from which to examine iconic language use. Confronting the framework with empirical data, we consider some of its key theoretical notions. Crucially, by reconceptualizing the typology of depictions, we identify an overlooked domain in the literature: “speech-embedded nonverbal depictions,” namely cases where meaning is communicated iconically, nonverbally, and without simultaneously co-occurring speech. In addition to contextualizing the phenomenon in relation to existing research, we demonstrate, with examples from American (...) TV talk shows, how such depictions function in real-life language use, offering a brief sketch of their complexities and arguing also for their theoretical significance. (shrink)

Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study investigates a naturally occurring interaction between two women who produced reciprocal emotional stances towards similar past experiences. Adopting a microanalytic approach, we describe how the participants re-enact their past experiences through different but aligning synchronized gestures. This embodied dialogue evolves into affective flooding, in which participants co-produce their body memories of pulling down window blinds to block out sunshine. We show how the participants live this moment intercorporeally and how (...) multiple timescales are tied together in gesture, which is both an incarnation of body history and a novel expression of it. Thus, collaborative gesturing is a resource for experiencing together emotions re-enacted from body memories. Contributing to our understanding of the intercorporeality of human action, we provide an empirical investigation into how emotions and multiple timescales are nested in cooperative gestures. Data are in Finnish with English translations. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

In theatre rehearsals, actors can occasionally be seen getting stuck in the play text, which is called blanking. To overcome such textual difficulties and continue with the given text, a prompter can verbalize the line in question, thus contributing to an actor’s word search by prompting. The paper focuses on interactional practices by which prompters and actors interactionally resolve blanking situations. This study’s data comprises a case collection of 67 prompting situations, which are taken from a 200-h video corpus of (...) a rehearsal process at a professional theatre. These cases demonstrate how theatre professionals organize prompting situations and how they negotiate/sanction prompting actions such as when there was no blanking but a dramatic pause or when the dramatic performance is interrupted due to a missing prompt. In addition to the audiovisual recordings, eye tracking data of the person prompting is also used to describe the coordination of the visual resources in the context of multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis suggests that prompting and blanking persons interactively resolve blankings with the help of verbal and visual markers. (shrink)

This study investigates moments in which one participant in an interaction embodies that he is “doing thinking,” a display that is commonly referred to as “thinking face. ” From an interactional perspective, it is assumed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” are a recurring social practice and serve interactive functions. While previous studies have examined thinking faces primarily in word searches and storytelling, the present study focuses on argumentative activities, in which children engage in processes of joint decision-making. The paper (...) has two interrelated aims. The first aim is to describe how multiple modalities—beyond the face—are temporally coordinated to create multimodal gestalts of “doing thinking.” It is shown that thinking displays not only involve dynamic imaginative gaze but also stylized bodily postures. The second aim is to generate knowledge about the functions of thinking displays in children's argumentative activities. The analysis describes how both speakers and recipients use thinking displays in different turn positions and align them with verbal talk or silence. The data for this study comprise video recordings of decision-making processes in groups of older children. Drawing on a multimodal approach to situated interaction, it will be proposed that embodied displays of “doing thinking” provide a resource to shape participation frameworks, mark epistemic stances and create epistemic ecologies for collaborative reasoning. By investigating thinking displays in a particular conversational activity, the study sheds light on the diversity and context-sensitive functionality of thinking displays. It also contributes to recent research on children's collaborative reasoning as an embodied discursive practice. (shrink)