Recall from Chapter One the DROP-CATCH fragment of the playful interaction between a father and daughter. Situated within their on-going line of activity, the child's active configuring of a particular embodied action -- the assembling together of its various internal structures and its enactment-over-time as she creates her request to be raised up -- permits her co-participant to recognize her action-turn as a request, and therefore, a first part in an adjacency pair sequence, and to recognize in that same moment its transition-relevance. The father displays his orientation both to the type of unit she has just performed (a request and a first pair-part) and to the transition-relevance of the moment, and he seamlessly performs his action-turn by complying rapidly and smoothly with her request and producing the immediately relevant next item due (a second pair-part of this compliance type) in the progressing course of their shared activity. This instance demonstrates two interactants seamlessly producing nonvocalized embodied action-turns in an adjacency pair sequence.

In the EYEROLL instance, we observed that the boy continues his turn long into the silence after he has ceased to speak. In the BENCH instance, Eve produces a series of action-turns that involve embodied, nonvocalized components.

Embodied actions in particular instances of interaction can affect the boundaries of what gets treated by participants as a completed turn and thereby can impact the smooth operation of the turn-taking system. That this is so will be demonstrated through close analyses of particular instances of everyday interaction guided by the following assertion --

Proposition One: Embodied actions constitute a fifth domain of

turn-construction unit types within the turn-taking system.

Embodied actions fulfill criteria for construction unit type. An

embodied action-turn may be characterized by some or all of

the following features:

- is recognizable to participants

- displays internal structures based on a body metric and

performed patterns of behavior that contribute to building

projectability of transition-relevant places

- is recipient-designed

- is locally-occasioned

- can locally-occasion and further sequential lines of action

in ways that are interactionally contingent and that are

oriented to and so treated by co-participants.

The claim in Proposition One has been formulated based on empirical observation and analyses of recurrent patterns of behavior in actual instances; the findings emerged from the data.

In his forthcoming work on grammar and interaction, Schegloff argues that:

What sorts of entities (described in grammatical or other terms)

will be used and treated as turn-constructional units is

determined by those who USE the language (broadly

understood -- that is, to include gesture, facial expression, etc.

when/where relevant), not those who study it academically.

(Ochs et al 1996, 115, note 3)

In their description of the turn-taking system (1974), Sacks et al. specify allowable unit-type as words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, and most conversation analytic research since has dealt with no other kind of turn-constructional unit. Proposition One is a summation of the finding that other "entities" -- embodied actions -- are recurrently being used and treated as turn-constructional units "by those who use the language", and that academics who study language-in-use may now include this unit-type in an expanding description of the turn-taking system and in further exploration of an interactional syntax.

In support of Proposition One, analyses of the data illustrate that the following two turn-type configurations may be used by co-present interactants to further a variety of communicative tasks (samples from Chapter One data):

(1) Embodied action turns consisting solely of nonvocalized

components

Mary: nO: she's jus kinda (0.9)

pu[ttin that jAW yyright exactly =

Alice: [((EA--embodied action------>...)) <---

 

(2) Embodied action turns consisting of vocalized and

nonvocalized components

Boy: my girlfriend]

((EA-eyeroll--[--(1.0)---->)) <---

Examination of particular instances of co-present interaction show both types of configurations of embodied action turns functioning within and constituting various types of adjacency-pair sequential structures (request/compliance, question/answer, assessment/ acknowledgment, proffer/response, and so forth). The data show that both types of configurations of embodied action turns may also be used to, for example, display irony, further tellings or reports, and, generally, constitute the turns of next-turn-holder in co-present interaction.

In the next sections, analyses of several exemplars are provided as evidence favoring Proposition One and illustrating recurrent, varied, and systematic uses of embodied actions as turn units in everyday encounters. Section Two specifically examines instances of embodied actions used by participants to constitute full turns in adjacency action-pair sequences.