On Building responsive Actions Using Non-vocal Practices
| Panel: | P75 - Non-Verbal Responses in Talk-in-Interaction |
| Author: | Berger, Israel |
| Author 2: | John Rae |
| Abstract: | |
| Although non-vocal practices have been an important issue in Conversation Analytic (CA) research, most of the key organizations that have been identified concern actions in interaction that are implemented through talk. When non-vocal practices have been examined, their relationship to the production of talk (e.g. how they affect its progressivity, Lerner, 2002) has been a central focus. The present report concerns non-vocal practices in a specific sequential environment, namely in response to initiating actions. Video data from a variety of everyday and institutional situations (e.g. household activities, school, healthcare), with participants of varying verbal and physical abilities and cultural backgrounds are examined. Most of the corpus was collected in the US or the UK and is in English (though not all participants are native English speakers). Using CA we examine some of the considerations involved in co-present participants choosing between implementing responsive actions vocally, non-vocally, or with both vocal and non-vocal elements. First, we show that members of a class of grossly informative gestures that have widely known and specific meanings in the context of their production (e.g. nodding in response to a yes/no interrogative) may be used in implementing a responsive action with or without accompanying talk. Second, responsive actions implemented non-verbally (and in particular, non-vocally) often start at the place where an action implemented through talk might start. However the endings of these actions are commonly less determinate and are often overlapped by talk. Third, we show how, by producing a non-vocal response alone, a participant can avoid a dispreferred response or a disingenuous preferred response whilst fulfilling the requirement to respond. |
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