30.2321, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Deppermann, Streeck (2018)

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Subject: 30.2321, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Deppermann, Streeck (2018)

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Date: Tue, 04 Jun 2019 12:09:46
From: Agnieszka Lyons [a.lyons at qmul.ac.uk]
Subject: Time in Embodied Interaction

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3887.html

EDITOR: Arnulf  Deppermann
EDITOR: Jürgen  Streeck
TITLE: Time in Embodied Interaction
SUBTITLE: Synchronicity and sequentiality of multimodal resources
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 293
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Agnieszka Lyons, Queen Mary, University of London

SUMMARY

“Time in embodied interaction: Synchronicity and sequentiality of multimodal
resources”, edited by Arnulf Deppermann and Jürgen Streeck, is a collection of
ten chapters devoted to an analysis of communication as embodied and both
shaping and shaped by temporality as a crucial feature of all human conduct.
All ten chapters bring insights into the way in which participants in
interactions mobilise their verbal and non-verbal behaviours (including
gesture, facial expressions, gaze and movement) as well as attend to and
modify the features of their surroundings to communicate and make sense of the
ongoing communicative context. Building on earlier work in context analysis,
nonverbal communication, linguistic anthropology (later ethnomethodology) and
conversation analysis, these studies rely on video-recorded data, which allows
for a thorough analysis of all (including silent) participants’ conduct within
interactions (including the simultaneous employment of multiple modes of
communication), which could have been overlooked in earlier studies. The
chapters consider different environments and different linguistic profiles of
interactants, with a focus either on the micro analysis of current situations
or their embedding within broader temporal scales.

In her chapter titled “Forward-looking: Where do we go with multimodal
projections?”, Anja Stukenbrock explores the temporal relationship between
verbal utterances, gestures and gaze in interactions, bringing in the concepts
of projection and conditional relevance to multimodal interactions. Through
the analysis of a range of multimodal contexts and zooming in on the minute
details of multimodal projections both between and within utterances,
Stukenbrock shows that multimodal deictic practices serve to summon the
addressee’s gaze, resulting in a co-orientation to a desired focus of
attention in the participants’ surroundings. Part of the analysis presented in
this chapter is based on data gathered through a dual mobile eye tracker,
which allows for an extremely high level of technical precision and analytical
granularity in pointing to the way in which participants monitor each other’s
gaze focus.

Shimako Iwasaki’s chapter “Suspending talk: Multimodal organization of
participation and stance in Japanese” explores the phenomenon of turn
suspension in Japanese conversations, drawing attention to the multimodal and
temporal coordination in interaction. She shows that speakers systematically
suspend their turns before completion drawing on the grammatical segmentation
of the Japanese language in order to enable the addressees’ responses to be
incorporated in the construction of individual turn-constructional units
(TCUs). The analysis presented in the chapter unveils four types of
interactions in which suspending talk achieves communicational intent. In the
first type, the speakers presents a candidate understanding and requests the
other participant’s confirmation. In the second type, the speaker shows
epistemic uncertainty of their own claim and requests confirmation. The third
type includes instances where participants coordinate their stances within a
turn. The fourth case includes situations where the speaker modifies the
content of their utterance following their partner’s disagreement. The
findings raise further questions about the location of the expression of
speakers’ stance within utterances and the need to consider TCUs as
co-produced by all those taking part in an interaction.

The focus of the third chapter, “The temporal organization of conversation
while mucking out a sheep stable” by Leelo Keevallik, is the management of
gaps in conversations occurring alongside a physically strenuous activity in
an enclosed space. The author argues that, in an environment where the
potential for verbal contributions exists alongside heavy physical labour,
response relevance is limited precisely due to the physically demanding nature
of the activity and the spatial orientation of participants in a confined
space. This context facilitates the occurrence of temporally extended
sequences, with unusually lengthy pauses, which do not seem to be perceived as
interactional lapses, but rather as gaps, after which the ongoing conversation
continues effortlessly. This data collection context contrasts with prior
studies which preferred the analysis of talk occurring in parallel to
non-strenuous physical activities (such as watching TV or driving). In
explaining the conversational organisation of such exchanges, Keevallik
proposes considering the issue of address and listener roles as well as the
types of participation involved in this setting. She finds that task-related
utterances take priority over the moral obligation to produce the next
relevant turn and concludes that similar exchanges should be seen as opting
into a conversation, with little commitment beyond the current turn.

In Chapter 4, “Revisiting delayed completions: The retrospective management of
co-participant actions”, Florence Oloff takes a pragmatic, temporal and
embodied approach to the social practice of continuing a turn irrespective of
a co-participant’s utterance (a practice which Lerner 1989 referred to as
delayed completion). Based on video data of mundane German conversations, she
points to a link between taking part in a multi-party multi-activity and the
occurrence of delayed completions. Involved in such focused action,
participants may not be able to perceive other participants’ embodied actions
or they may be able to monitor only one other participant in a group. Through
this and other observations, the author shows that delayed completions are not
only parts of the sequences of turns-at-talk, but that they occur against the
background of simultaneously evolving states and forms of presence as well as
potential object manipulation.
 
Lorenza Mondada’s chapter “Questions on the move: The ecology of
question-answer sequences in mobility settings” focuses on the ways in which
ecology of action impacts on the availability, shape, visibility and
efficiency of multimodal resources in multimodal interactions. Mondada
addresses the question of the temporal organisation of multimodality and the
situatedness of action formation within the context of a guided tour. She
discusses questions asked when the group is about to move and while it is on
the move and shows that the format and placement of the question can
correspond to the availability of the questionee and the need to advance the
tour. This in turn determines the length of the response. The different ways
in which questions are treated in this context impacts the relevant
participation frameworks, that is the individual vs collective recipient
design of the answers.

Chapter 6 (“Bodily shadowing: Learning to be an orchestral conductor” by Chiho
Sunakawa) provides an account of an instructional interaction between an
orchestral conducting teacher and students, focusing on the synchronous nature
of body movements which the author refers to as “bodily shadowing”. It is
shown that participants coordinate talk, gaze and other actions to establish a
suitable context for such bodily shadowing. This in turn allows students to
acquire the relevant conducting skills and demonstrate their embodied
understanding. This study contributes to the growing body of research on
instruction beyond strictly educational context, which posits that instruction
should be treated as a collaborative action which involves the use of verbal
and non-verbal behaviours. In the specific case of orchestral conducting,
bodily shadowing is also situated in a specific musical context, where
maintaining tempo and harmony are vital.

In Chapter 7, titled “Prefiguring the future: Projections and preparations
within theatrical rehearsals”, Axel Schmidt analyses the way in which
projections-by-arrangements and preparations in theatre rehearsals serve to
prefigure (foreshadow and pre-shape) an upcoming play.
Projections-by-arrangements verbally describe or negotiate certain aspects of
a play, while projections are immediate interventions into the material world
and include embodied actions involving objects that are used to modify the
physical environment in preparation for a rehearsal. Drawing on these two
practices helps actors establish the necessary preconditions for the
successful running of the rehearsal. Although both projections-by-arrangements
and preparations serve to prepare parts of the upcoming stage event, they
differ with respect to the multimodal resources they rely on, their relations
to the material environment. This implies a difference in their temporalities
as they involve a type of time manipulation (projections-by-arrangement bridge
the time between now and the stage play itself, while preparations have an
immediate impact on the surroundings in ways which become relevant to the play
in the future).

Sae Oshima (Chapter 8: “Embodiment of activity progress: The temporalities of
service evaluation”) presents an analysis of the temporal organisation of a
service-assessment in haircutting sessions. The main focus is on the way in
which a hair stylist and a customer negotiate the progress of this part of a
service encounter in order to ensure that the amount of time spent evaluating
the quality of a haircut is appropriate. Activity progression is analysed from
the perspective of both verbal and physical activities and responds to a call
to consider such encounters within a multimodal activity framework (Deppermann
2013). Oshima finds that participants demonstrate a structural preference for
progressivity, which in this case is seen as a multi-dimensional and
multi-temporal phenomenon. In the process of service evaluation, participants
not only get an opportunity to conduct a service assessment, but allow the
stylist and the client to increase the value of the service, making the
transaction more meaningful for both parties.

Chapter 9, “Changes in turn-design over interactive histories – the case of
instructions in driving school lessons”, focuses on the changes in the
turn-design within a course of driving lessons over time. Arnulf Deppermann
demonstrates how the same instructional action is constructed by the same
speaker to the same addressee in consecutive attempts at completing the task
of reverse parking. This is based on four complete sets of driving lessons
with the same instructor, which allow the researcher to track the progression
of the teaching/learning relationship between specific pairs of interactants.
Taking into account the issue of recipient design and the accumulation of
common ground between interactants, he concludes that over time, interactants
in such instructional relationships grow to rely on highly indexical and
elliptical practices, instead of precise and explicit explanations of the
task, which the instructor uses when the reverse parking manoeuvre is first
explained to the learner. In this context, modified recipient design is a
response to the shifting positioning of the student from a novice to a
competent driver over the course of a number of trials. 

In the final chapter of the volume, titled “Times of rest: Temporalities of
some communicative postures”, Jürgen Streeck turns to the discussion of
postures – body positions that people adopt for a sustained moment of
interactions. In the analysis, he draws on video data collected in an
auto-shop in the US and in a German classroom. He considers four intersecting
time-scales: the immediate interaction context, the  relationship between
interactants within a given exchange, bodies’ own needs (especially tiring
over the course of a day and activity), and ‘self-making’, i.e., the
biographical scale on which posture habits are shaped (p. 326). His interest
in postures and posture configurations stems from the belief that human bodies
are primarily living organisms, rather than “sign-producing apparatuses” (p.
326). Following from the analysis, Streeck calls for a shift from regarding
bodies as signalling systems, abstracting away from the bodies that enact the
system, and instead seeing them as systems in their own right, which operate
and develop within their own time-scales. We then need to consider positions
enacted by bodies as adaptations of the body in question to the nature of the
task at hand (physical work in the auto-shop).

As a whole, the volume, which would be of interest to an academic audience
with an interest in the micro-organisation of human interactions, points to
the complex interplay between various temporal scales within embodied social
interactions and argues for the need to see communication as involving not
only verbal exchanges but also meaningful bodily conduct. 

EVALUATION

This edited volume set out to explore how social interaction is organised as a
“multi-modal and multi-sensory process of bodily activities” (p. 1) which
occur within a material context. 

Having drawn on earlier studies in conversation analysis and context analysis,
responding to earlier questions concerning the temporal trajectories of
embodied actions (e.g., gestures in Kendon 2004) and the multiplicity of
temporal references that impact on the meaning-making content of embodied
behaviour, the chapters in the volume bring to light the need to approach
social interaction research from a broader perspective in order to avoid
misrepresentation and incomplete analysis of data. This is supported by the
call for the employment of video-data in research, for which a strong case has
been made throughout the volume. Whether focused on a single type of bodily
action or on a micro-analysis of an array of embodied behaviours, the chapters
demonstrate the need to engage with the data on a complex multi-layered basis
and point to the need to consider temporal scales going beyond the now to
account for interactional histories of interactive participants (Deppermann’s
chapter) as well as the life of the body and its tiring (Streeck’s chapter).
Similarly, the need to cross the temporal scale of the immediate activity to
show how actions taken in the present impact activities in the future
(Schmidt’s chapter) is also recognised. Overall, the volume successfully
demonstrates the relevant phenomena and asks important questions about the
impact that these new observations may have on the field of conversation
analysis (CA) more generally. This focus suggests that there might be a need
to reconsider the CA domain of study (talk-in-interaction) in the light of the
availability and richness of video data. 

Taking into account its focus and quality, this volume is particularly suited
to linguistics and interaction analysts as well as scholars working within the
broadly understood framework of multimodal analysis. It could also be of
interest to both academics as well as postgraduate and advanced undergraduate
students. 

The volume is consistently well-written and beautifully presented, with a
large number of screenshots in colour in every chapter. The introductory
chapter by the editors (“The body in interaction: Its multiple modalities and
temporalities”) presents a very clear case for the need for the analytic focus
it proposes and helpfully situates the chapters against the background of
existing research. All the relevant points from across the volume are
accounted for and presented within a broader discussion of the literature and
the field. This helps the reader fill in the gaps while reading the individual
chapters. One thing that could have been improved in this publication is
including a closing discussion chapter, which would help round the volume off.

REFERENCES

Deppermann, Arnulf. 2013. “Multimodal interaction from a Conversation Analytic
perspective.” Journal of Pragmatics 46(1):1-7.

Kendon, Adam. 2004. Gesture. Visual action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Lerner, Gene H. 1989. “Notes on Overlap Management in Conversation: The Case
of Delayed Completion.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 53: 167-177.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Agnieszka Lyons is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Queen Mary University of
London, UK. Her research employs multimodal and mediated discourse analytic as
well as ethnographic approaches to explore the discursive construction of
embodied identity in polycentric migrant environments. She is also interested
in the way time and space are used as discursive resources in technologically
mediated interactions across geographical distance. She has published in
Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics, and Social Semiotics, among
others.





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