Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations

Abstract

The study focuses on turns in interaction that involve a bodily-vocal demonstration: an embodied demonstration that is accompanied by a non-lexical vocalization. It shows how the temporal organization of these demonstrations contributes to participant treatment of them as a part of a turn-constructional unit, mostly as its completion. It is also suggested that a bodilyvocal demonstration may function as a separate turn-constructional unit, with a transition relevance point before it, and other participants refraining from action before its completion. Vocalizations, occasionally with coherent pitch contours of intonation units, are argued to render bodily displays vocal space within turns-at-talk. After a bodily-vocal demonstration, the turn-constructional unit can be recompleted with verbal devices, displaying further similarity to verbal-only turns. The analysis calls into attention the relevance of embodied behavior to the emergence of units in conversation. Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations 1

Sounds on the Margins of Language at the Heart of Interaction

“…Yet another issue is how the vocalizations get incorporated into meaningful units in conversation. The two clicks at line 10 in Excerpt 1 are treated as a turn constructional unit (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), even though there is no conventional verbal material (see Keevallik, 2014, for arguments on vocalizations constituting turn constructional units). In Excerpt 2 the dance teacher launches a syntactic unit by "We're gonna go" but ends it with a dance demonstration accompanied by vocalizations, together with her partner.…”

Rhythmical coordination of performers and audience in partner dance: delineating improvised and choreographed interaction

“…The 'embodied turn' in CA studies (Nevile, 2015) has emphasised how participants use conventionalised sequences of embodied talk, gesture, and body orientation to pursue -or to constrain and reorganise courses of situated social action (C. Goodwin, 1981;Haddington et al, 2013;Hazel, Mortensen, & Rasmussen, 2014;Heath, 1984;Schegloff, 1985). CA studies of Lindy hop workshops (Broth & Keevallik, 2014;Keevallik, 2014) show how dance instructors combine talk, partnered movement and 'bodily-vocal demonstrations' as instructions for students to follow -and as 'corrections' for when students visibly deviate from a normatively adequate response (Keevallik, 2010). In these situations, teachers and students, or storytellers and recipients encounter 'polythetic' moments where their responses can uphold, abort, or modify the overall course of action.…”

“…In the setting of the Lindy hop Jack and Jill, these responses provide detailed and ongoing evidence through participants' displays of rhythmical involvement. CA studies of the 'choral production' (Lerner, 2002) of action and gesture by multiple speakers simultaneously, and how bodily-vocal actions are produced in dance instruction (Keevallik, 2010(Keevallik, , 2014) also highlight how different kinds of projectability and rhythmical timing (Broth & Keevallik, 2014) This claim suggests the possibility of extending studies of dance performance settings using collections of cases to refine and generalise characterisations of how rhythmical embodied actions are formed and recognised by participants. However, Hazel et al (2014) describes this as a "CA paradigm" and points to some possible problems with this approach even where participants' talk is also available, citing ongoing debate as to whether (and how) complex embodied displays can be collected and studied in this way.…”

“…Highly elaborate and complex cooperative actions are built through ongoing displays of precisely timed reciprocal talk and embodiment (C. Goodwin, 2013), and central to CA accounts of intersubjective understanding are robust repair mechanisms for stopping the progress of action to deal with evidence of troubles in speaking, hearing or understanding (Schegloff, 1992;Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). However, the linguistic resources required to repair troubles that may have emerged some time earlier are not so readily available to bodies moving together in time (Bassetti, 2011;Keevallik, 2010Keevallik, , 2014. This is even more the case in the midst of performance situations (Merlino, 2014;Weeks, 2002), where stopping and attempting to rectify troubled coordination by re-staging it would be tantamount to aborting the performance as such.…”

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

“…recent contributions in Rasmussen et al, 2014). Keevallik (2014) for example proposed an analysis of (non-linguistic) vocalizations as TCUs in their own right (cf. also Goodwin et al, 2000, on the use of nonsense syllables as TCUs or .…”