Action in Interaction: The Mutual Elaboration of Talk, Body, Setting and Activity
| Number: | P62 |
| Organizer: | Goodwin, Charles |
| Co-Organizer: | Curtis LeBaron |
| Abstract: | |
| This panel will show how human action is constructed through the simultaneous use of a range of meaning-making resources. For example, people regularly enact a relationship between gesture and the talk that accompanies their gesture; sometimes a turn at talk involves the lexical and prosodic performance of a speaker, in coordination with the embodied and visible displays of hearers; and features of the surround or setting, including encompassing activities, are often deeply consequential for the organization of local action. Panel presentations will address questions such as the following: • When people construct action through their simultaneous use of multiple resources, do they display or treat their actions as being so constructed? • It is common to gloss pragmatic actions with simple lexical terms (such as “request” or “greeting”) and thereby treat the actions as homogenous and self-contained wholes. To what extent are pragmatic actions in fact semiotically heterogenous in their organization? • Can human action (even very simple forms of action) be adequately described within frameworks that focus on single systems in isolation? • When an action is accomplished through the use of diverse resources, does this constitute a “whole” that is not found in the individual parts, and is this central to how the action is understood, what it is doing, and how it is adapted to the changing contingencies of unfolding context? • Can the structure of action be distributed across separate participants, utterances, and semiotic fields? How do participants orient to the structure of activities in ways that are consequential for, and visible within, their immediate local actions? The panel will bring together both senior and junior scholars from different parts of the world investigating such issues in diverse materials. |
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