How Shared Meanings and Uses Emerge Over an Interactional History:
            <i>Wabi Sabi</i>
            in a Series of Theater Rehearsals

Deppermann, Arnulf; Schmidt, Axel

doi:10.1080/08351813.2021.1899714

Cited by 21 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Yet when we start from actions, and track the resources deployed therein, we begin to see the other side of the coin: Although the diversification of grammar may allow people to accomplish more and more diverse actions in more and more varied situations in increasingly context-sensitive ways Pekarek Doehler & Berger, 2018), recurrent dealings with precise actions within precise situations and precise local contingencies may have the effect of stabilizing and ultimately routinizing the grammatical solutions deployed therein (Pekarek Doehler, in press). The diverse repertoire of grammatical resources that people develop throughout their lives may be nothing more than the product of people's repeated dealing with the myriad of social-interactional exigencies they encounter across their interactional histories (see also Deppermann & Schmidt, 2021/this issue, for a longitudinal study of participants' appropriating the meaning of an expression). Although supporting the idea that linguistic structure arises from the contingencies of use and specifically from talk-in-interaction (Bybee & Hopper, 2001, p. 3;Fox, 2007, p. 299;Hopper, 2011), this foregrounds the eminently activitybound nature of grammatical resources and interactional competence and their development.…”

Section: Discussion: Recalibrating Resources For Action When Adapting To New Situations Languages And/or Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Routinization of Grammar as a Social Action Format: A Longitudinal Study of Video-Mediated Interactions

Doehler

Balaman

2021

Research on Language and Social Interaction

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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 grammarfor-interaction while adapting to new situations, languages, or media. Data are in English.People coordinate their social interaction with others through the use of mutually recognizable practical procedures for action-that is, "methods" in the ethnomethodological sense of the term (Garfinkel, 1967). Based on these procedures, they manage fundamental organizational issues such as turn-taking, sequencing of actions, and opening or closing conversation. Methods develop experientially over time, based on people's repeated engagement in locally accomplished social interactions , and so do the multisemiotic resources deployed as part of these methods. Methods and the related resources, the sharedness of which warrants mutual accountability of social actions (Garfinkel, 1967), constitute people's interactional competence.Existing longitudinal studies on the development of interactional competence in a first (L1) or a second/foreign/additional language (L2) across a range of different settings converge on evidencing that such development implies the progressive diversification of practices and resources for interaction (on L1 see, e.g., Wootton, 1997; on L2 see overviews by Pekarek Doehler & Pochon-Berger, 2015;Skogmyr Marian & Balaman, 2018). This diversification allows for increasingly context-sensitive and recipient-designed conduct (cf. Sacks & Schegloff, 1979;Sacks et al., 1974)-that is, conduct that is more and more acutely tailored to the precise situation and the precise others at hand (see also Skogmyr Marian, 2021/this issue).Such development is not just part of L1 or L2 learning but is constitutive of the very way we navigate our social lives. Our interactional histories bring about unprecedented types of social situations, which we enter as novices, progressively adapting our practices to the precise constraints CONTACT Simona Pekarek Doehler

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Section: Discussion: Recalibrating Resources For Action When Adapting To New Situations Languages And/or Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Routinization of Grammar as a Social Action Format: A Longitudinal Study of Video-Mediated Interactions

Doehler

Balaman

2021

Research on Language and Social Interaction

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“…Together they constitute a shared knowledge territory, where all parties have independent epistemic access and the topics which have been previously co-produced as social workable matters. Where we are unable to observe and analyse how co-participants built those shared meanings through those prior sessions, how this shared knowledge territory developed is inaccessible (Deppermann and Schmidt, 2021). However, the parties in a session may make explicit reference to topics from prior sessions that offer insights into that history and how it can be used in the present encounter.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-producing a social workable matter: Topics and collaborating in social work encounters

Canty

2022

Qualitative Social Work

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A common task in encounters with professionals is to identify a matter warranting professional assistance. Co-producing a ‘social workable’ matter in social work encounters as an interactional achievement is yet to be explored. Specifying this as an institutional and interactional project creates the opportunity to analyse how topics are collaboratively used in social work encounters to achieve a joint understanding of the work for the session. Such projects offer insights into the social actions involved in identifying matters that are relevant to the service, setting and professional encounter. Conversation analysis (CA) of real-world social work sessions offers a way to understand how social workers and clients produce, elaborate and pursue topics as a collaborative achievement. This detailed analytic approach illuminates how social workable matters are co-produced in interaction and creates an opportunity to examine and improve collaboration in interpersonal practice contexts.

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“…This is achieved by quoting lines from the script (lines 4/8) and by reproducing a choreographed movement (the hammer swing; Figure 2). Both are part of the participants' common ground concerning this particular production (see Deppermann and Schmidt, 2021). The director's demonstration integrates several multimodal resources into a gestalt (Ehmer and Brône, 2021;Stukenbrock, 2021), which exhibits a particular procedural structure (first a certain text line, then the hammer swing, then the next line), projecting and constraining certain next features within the gestalt (Deppermann and Günthner, 2015;Mondada, 2019b).…”

Section: Demonstrations Instruct By Showing Not Tellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to instructional framings provided locally, common ground (concerning occupational practices, the script text, etc.) and the interactional history concerning previous agreements about the performance play a crucial role (on iterativity in rehearsals see Hazel, 2018;Hsu et al, 2021b;Löfgren and Hofstetter, 2021; on the emergence of common ground over interactional histories in rehearsals see Deppermann and Schmidt, 2021;Schmidt and Deppermann, in press).…”

Section: How Language Features In Embodied Demonstrationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Showing and telling—How directors combine embodied demonstrations and verbal descriptions to instruct in theater rehearsals

Schmidt

Deppermann

2023

Front. Commun.

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In theater as a bodily-spatial art form, much emphasis is placed on the way actors perform movements in space as an important multimodal resource for creating meaning. In theater rehearsals, movements are created in series of directors' instructions and actors' implementations. Directors' instructions on how to conduct a movement often draw on embodied demonstrations in contrast to verbal descriptions. For instance, to instruct an actress to act like a school girl a director can use depictive (he demonstrates the expected behavior) instead of descriptive (“can you act like a school girl”) means. Drawing on a corpus of 400 h video recordings of rehearsal interactions in three German professional theater productions, from which we selected 265 cases, we examine ways to instruct movement-based actions in theater rehearsals. Using a multimodally extended ethnomethodological-conversation analytical approach, we focus on the multimodal details that constitute demonstrations as complex action types. For the present article, we have chosen nine instances, through which we aim to illuminate (1) The difference in using embodied demonstrations versus verbal descriptions to instruct; (2) typical ways directors combine verbal descriptions with embodied demonstrations in their instructions. First, we ask what constitutes a demonstration and what it achieves in comparison to verbal descriptions. Using a typical case, we illustrate four characteristics of demonstrations that all of the cases we studied share. Demonstrations (1) are embedded in instructional activities; (2) show and do not tell; (3) are responded to by emulating what was shown; (4) are rhetorically shaped to convey the instruction's focus. However, none of the 265 demonstrations we investigated were produced without verbal descriptions. In a second step we therefore ask in which typical ways verbal descriptions accompany embodied demonstrations when directors instruct actors how to play a scene. We distinguish four basic types. Verbal descriptions can be used (1) to build the demonstration itself; (2) to delineate a demonstration verbally within an instruction; (3) to indicate positive (what should be done) and negative (what should be avoided) versions of demonstrations; (4) as an independent means to describe the instruction's focus in addition to the demonstration. Our study contributes to research on how embodied resources are used to create meaning and how they combine with and depend on verbal resources.

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How Shared Meanings and Uses Emerge Over an Interactional History: Wabi Sabi in a Series of Theater Rehearsals

Cited by 21 publications

References 32 publications

The Routinization of Grammar as a Social Action Format: A Longitudinal Study of Video-Mediated Interactions

The Routinization of Grammar as a Social Action Format: A Longitudinal Study of Video-Mediated Interactions

Co-producing a social workable matter: Topics and collaborating in social work encounters

Showing and telling—How directors combine embodied demonstrations and verbal descriptions to instruct in theater rehearsals

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