SECTION 3.1.1

 

EMBODIED ACTIONS AND THE TURN-TAKING SYSTEM

In the course of everyday communicative encounters, co-present interactants move their facial features, head, arms, hands, body, and eyes. Frequently, such movements are produced in an observably coordinated manner, and they inhabit and may constitute structured and recognizable communicative actions. This section situates the study of embodied actions constituting and organizing turns within the theoretical and empirical framework of the turn-taking system.

Many researchers have studied and are studying various intricate ways in which we go about managing and making sense of everyday interaction: through spoken utterance, gesture, facial movement, gaze, head movement, and body movement, among other resources. Conversation analysts have established that these resources get arranged within a "simplest systematics" for turn-taking by speakers in conversation based on a standard four types of spoken construction units:

1. Words

2. Phrases

3. Clauses

4. Sentences

and on two turn-allocation techniques (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; West and Zimmerman 1982; Lerner 1991). Closer examination of the turn-taking system provides a framework for the examination of how embodied actions can operate as, and within, action-turns.