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)

This article draws on work at the interface of grammar and interaction to argue that the clause is a locus of interaction, in the sense that it is one of the most frequent grammatical formats which speakers orient to in projecting what actions are being done by others' utterances and in acting on these projections. Yet the way in which the clause affords grammatical projectability varies significantly from language to language. In fact, it depends on the nature of the clausal (...) grammatical formats which are available as resources in a language: in some languages these allow early projection in the turn unit, in others they do not. We focus here on these two languages and show that their variable grammatical projectability has repercussions on the way in which three interactional phenomena – next-turn onset, co-construction, and turn-unit extension – are realized in the respective speech communities. In each case the practices used are precisely the ones which the clausal grammatical formats in the given language promote. The evidence thus suggests that clauses are interactionally warranted, if variably built, formats for social action. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and describe a new practice for responding to unfinished requests, which we call telescoping responses, due to their being designed for telescoping the request sequence forward in the face of troubles with progressivity and in producing the request. Considering cases from an American shoe repair shop, we demonstrate that telescoping responses serve to telescope request sequences exactly because they are neither syntactically, prosodically or pragmatically fitted to the unfinished requests that they respond to.

Studies of joint productions have often focused on instances where a recipient anticipates through completions what a speaker might be about to say, or through expansion what that speaker could plausibly go on to say. However, recent work suggests that grammatically fitted continuations may also alter or redirect the projected trajectory of a prior speaker's turn or utterance. In this paper, building on this prior work, we focus on cases in Japanese interaction where grammatically fitted continuations of one speaker's turn (...) or utterance by another speaker accomplished through "format tying" effects some kind of transformation of the action or stance implemented by that prior turn. We term these "transformative continuations," and propose that while they are invariably disaligning, they may nevertheless implement both affiliative and disaffiliative stances. We propose that an analysis of transformative continuations thus leads us to a consideration of both the degree to which participants may orient to these as affiliative, as well as the ways in which the respective participants may be held accountable for such instances of joint production. (shrink)

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)

This paper employs conversation analysis to examine the inter-connection between grammar and displays of contextual understanding, social identity, and social relationships as well as other activities clustering around turn-endings in Japanese talk-in-interaction, while undertaking a restricted comparison with the realisation of similar activities in English. A notable feature of turn-endings in Japanese is the particular salience of grammatical construction on the interactional activities they accomplish. Complete turns which are also syntactically complete are shown to be associated with the explicit display (...) of contextual features, whereas syntactically incomplete turns are designed to circumvent or minimise such displays. The explicit or implicit display of one's social and contextual relationship to the interactional environment is therefore seen to be an integral part of the performance of social actions in Japanese. On the other hand, in English, it is more difficult to establish a clear association between grammar and the inclusion or avoidance of contextual displays. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the larger notion of cooperation in interaction and its underlying dimensions as defined in Conversation Analysis: alignment and affiliation. Focusing on three cases from three different languages we investigate a specific practice, that of anticipatory completions, in a particular context, that of storytelling, and show that the practice of completing another speaker’s turn in an anticipatory manner is not de facto definable as either an aligning or non-aligning action, nor can it be said to be (...) either affiliating or non-affiliating. Through our analyses, we aim to distinguish and illustrate the manifold layers of and perspectives to alignment and affiliation and argue for their relevance for studies of interactional phenomena. We conclude that the notion of cooperation and its implementation through affiliating and/or aligning actions is a multi-layered and complex issue, the intricacies of which are best understood and captured through detailed sequential analyses. (shrink)