The article investigates a multimodal practice for self-selecting observed in a video-taped corpus of work meetings: the use of pointing gestures predicting possible turn completions and projecting the emergence of possible next speakers. This practice is analyzed in various sequential positions, namely at turn beginnings and at pre-beginnings. It displays recipients' practical online turn parsing, and their orientation to transition spaces, and to TCU, completions in a visible, recognizable, public way. It shows the emergent and progressive establishment of speakership, exploiting (...) both systematic features of turn-taking and specific features of the interactional space. The article explores the emic, locally situated and contingent definition of speakership by considering not only where pointing gestures begin but also where they end: pointing does not only end in pre-completion positions, projecting turn end, but can also persist through sequences, showing speaker's orientations to her turn's sequential implicativeness. Thus, by observing a particular multimodal practice within a specific interactional setting, the article explores participants' orientations to the rights and obligations associated with talk-related categories such as `non current speaker', `possible next speaker', `incipient speaker' and `current speaker'. (shrink)

This article takes the motorway seriously as a place where the society of traffic can be found and studied. While many kinds of activities are done by drivers and passengers in parallel with driving on the motorway, such as listening to the radio, eating lunch or caring for, or being, children, I focus here on office work. Empirical material from a video-ethnography of one driver doing paperwork and overtaking a slow-moving vehicle ahead is used to examine in detail some of (...) the practices of combining driving and office-duties in the car while in motion. Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, the article examines how this mobile society is naturally organized as an architectural configuration brought to life in the practices of driving in traffic. Overlooked phenomena that are orderly stable features of being mobile are analysed, such as ‘overtaking’, ‘tailgating’ and ‘cruising’. Where other writers have used ‘speed’ to theorize the contemporary period, a brief re-specification is offered in the light of the uses, moral and otherwise, of speed within, and as made apprehensible in relation to, traffic. (shrink)

This book makes available five classic studies of the organisation of behaviour in face-to-face interaction. It includes Adam Kendon's well-known study of gaze-direction in interaction, his study of greetings, of the interactional functions of facial expression and of the spatial organisation of naturally occurring interaction, as recorded by means of film or videotape. They represent some of the best work undertaken within the 'natural history' tradition of interaction studies, as originally formulated in the work of Bateson, Birdwhistell and Goffman. Chapter (...) 2, written especially for this new book, provides an historical and theoretical discussion of this tradition, and a new final chapter takes up the theme of the organisation of attention in interaction. The introduction provides details of the circumstances of how each paper came to be written. Each of the papers reprinted is accompanied by a short postscript, placing the work in the context of more recent research. Several of the papers presented in this volume, although widely referred to, have long been difficult to obtain. Their republication will be warmly welcomed by all students and teachers who are concerned with face-to-face interaction. (shrink)