Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings


Book Description

This edited book revisits the concept of social ‘activities’ from an interactional perspective, examining how verbal, vocal, visual-spatial and material resources are deployed by participants for meaning-making in social encounters. The eleven original chapters within this volume analyse activities based on video recordings of naturalistic and naturally occurring social encounters from face-to-face and mediated settings in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, and German. Informed primarily by the methodological approaches of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, the authors study embodiment in space and time in three distinct types of situations: objects in space, complex participation frameworks, and affiliation and alignment. Moreover, the book includes a theoretical and methodological discussion of how activities are constituted and visibly embodied in interaction. It will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology and linguistics in general, and face-to-face and mediated interaction in particular.







Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion


Book Description

This volume discusses current and emerging trends in Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA). Focusing on step-by-step procedures of talk and interaction in real time, EMCA explores how people – through locally-produced, public, and common-sensical practices – accomplish activities together and thereby make sense and create social order as part of their everyday lives. The volume is divided into four parts, and it provides a timely methodological contribution by exploring new questions, settings, and recording technologies in EMCA for the study of social interaction. It addresses the methodical diversity in EMCA, including current practices as well as those testing its boundaries, and paves the way for the development of future interaction research. At the same time, the book offers readers a glimpse into the ways in which human and non-human participants operate with each other and make sense of the world around them. The authors represent diverse fields of research, such as language studies, sociology, social psychology, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Ultimately, the book is a conversation opener that invites critical and constructive dialogue on how EMCA’s methodology and toolbox could be developed for the purpose of acquiring richer perspectives on endogenous social action. This is key reading for researchers and advanced students on a range of courses on conversation analysis, language in interaction, discourse studies, multimodality, and more.




Quoting in Parliamentary Question Time


Book Description

Why do recordings of speakers engaging in reported speech at British Prime Minister's Questions from the 1970s–80s sound so distant to us? This cutting-edge study explores how the practices of quoting have changed at parliamentary question time in light of changing conventions and an evolving media landscape. Comparing data from authentic audio and video recordings from 1978 to 1988 and from 2003 to 2013, it provides evidence for qualitative and quantitative changes at the micro level (e.g., grammaticalisation processes in the reporting clause) and in more global structures (e.g., rhetorical patterns, and activities). These analytic findings contribute to the theoretical modelling of evidentiality in English, our understanding of constructions, interaction, and change, and of PMQs as an evolving community of practice. One of the first large-scale studies of recent change in an interactional genre of English, this ground-breaking monograph offers a framework for a diachronic interactional (socio-) linguistic research programme.




Multimodality and Social Interaction in Online and Offline Shopping


Book Description

This collection brings together social semiotic, ethnographic, and conversation analytic approaches to multimodality in global studies of shopping, drawing on the rich diversity of the latest multimodal methods to critically reflect on shopping as a cornerstone of contemporary social life. The volume explores shopping as an area of study in its own right, with the buying and selling of goods and services a fundamental part of the social and cultural life of human communities for centuries. The book looks at both online and offline shopping, examining it as both everyday multi-sensorial practice and its translation into the interactive text and imagery that comprise the online shopping experience, from London street markets to Japanese grocery shops to Danish supermarkets to worldwide online shopping sites. Highlighting the diversity of modern multimodal approaches through contributions from established scholars, the book critically surveys both the challenges and opportunities in the embodied interactions between buyers and sellers and how these points of connection have been translated and will continue to transform in the age of algorithms and emergent technologies. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in multimodality, multimodal conversation analysis, social semiotics, social interaction, and retail studies.




Mobilizing Others


Book Description

Requesting, recruitment, and other ways of mobilizing others to act have garnered much interest in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. This volume takes a holistic perspective on the practices that we use to get others to act either with us, or for us. It argues for a more explicit focus on ‘activity’ in unpacking the linguistic and embodied choices we make in designing mobilizing moves. Drawing on studies from a variety of different languages and settings, the collected studies in this volume illustrate how interactants design their turns not only for specific recipients, but also for a specific interactional situation. In doing so, speakers are able to mobilize others’ cooperation, contribution, or assistance in the most appropriate and economical ways. By focusing on ‘situation design’ across languages and settings, this volume provides new insights into the ways in which the ongoing activity, with its attendant participation structures, shapes the design, placement, and understanding of moves which mobilize others to act.




Organizational Video-Ethnography Revisited


Book Description

This book explores the undeveloped potential of video-ethnography to study the material, embodied and sensory dimensions of workplace practices. With the growing interest in sociomateriality and the development of research on the embodied and sensory dimensions of organizational practices, some methodological challenges of this type of research need to be addressed. The main purpose of this book is to present various forms of video-ethnography that make organizational phenomena visible and help better appreciate the organizing properties of bodies, affects, senses and spaces in workplace practices. To do so, illustrative cases based on video-ethnography was discussed to understand how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a video-based approach can be made meaningful and relevant to study the material, embodied and sensory dimension of work practices. This book is addressed to researchers and students in social sciences and organizational studies and offers a methodological reflection on how to study the material, embodied, and sensory dimensions of organizational life.




Conversation Analytic Perspectives to Digital Interaction


Book Description

This book offers a collection of state-of-the-art conversation analytic work on the impact of different types of digital technologies and media on social interaction. It furthers our understanding of whether and to what extent the varying practices of digital interaction can be considered adaptations of the basic organisations and resources of co-present face-to-face interaction. The chapters explore the emerging practices in contemporary digital interaction and in interaction related to digital technologies. The volume is organised into four sections according to the platform or type of digital interaction: mobile messaging, social media, video conferencing, and human-computer interaction. Each of the chapters highlights an interactional or linguistic phenomenon – an action, a practice, a sequence, or a larger structure. Some of these are unique to online environments, such as emojis or hashtags, whereas some occur in both online and offline interaction, such as repair initiators and proposal sequences.




A Pragmatic Approach to Fluency and Disfluency in Learner Language


Book Description

This monograph presents analyses of filled and unfilled pauses, cut-offs, repair, discourse markers and other phenomena often referred to as disfluencies in the context of advanced language learners' PowerPoint presentations. It adopts a multimodal perspective to demonstrate the functions of these elements in interaction. Paired with gaze shifts, pointing gestures and posture shifts, they act as facilitators of joint visual orientation, mutual understanding, and accountable actions. Therefore, this volume suggests the name cofluency to reflect their potential functionality. Cofluencies are essential elements of multimodal chunks and multimodal patterns, and these are building blocks of a multimodal turn-taking mechanism for presentations. These concepts are illustrated and discussed based on excerpts from naturally occurring classroom data.




Communicative Constructions and the Refiguration of Spaces


Book Description

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license Through a variety of empirical studies, this volume offers fresh insights into the manner in which different forms of communicative action transform urban space. With attention to the methodological questions that arise from the attempt to study such changes empirically, it offers new theoretical foundations for understanding the social construction and reconstruction of spaces through communicative action. Seeing communicative action as the basic element in the social construction of reality and conceptualizing communication not only in terms of the use of language and texts, but as involving any kind of objectification, such as technologies, bodies and non-verbal signs, it considers the roles of both direct and mediatized (or digitized) communication. An examination of the conceptualization of the communicative (re-)construction of spaces and the means by which this change might be empirically investigated, this book demonstrates the fruitfulness of the notion of refiguration as a means by which to understand the transformation of contemporary societies. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, and geographers with interests in social construction and urban space.