What does Abe do with his body as he is uttering "uh ah", and thereafter?

(Click on PLAY button for SEWING 2 SLOW. Note at one point Abe's action has been digitally reversed to make its pathway more evident)

1 Abe: no:. thuh uh 'hh only boys. and the girls

2 a:re (0.2) [uh ah <---

[((EA-sewing[------------------------>

Abe comes out of the (0.2) pause uttering "uh" as he begins raising both hands off the table and moving them toward each other in front of his chest and in the transaction space (Kendon 1990, 211) directly between Sue and himself, thereby making his performance visually available to her and indicating its recipient-design for her. As he is doing this, his right hand is held in a slightly closed position and we observe him tracing with it a curved trajectory in that space (down and then up again). Just as he completes the prominent upward movement with his right hand, Abe re-directs his gaze toward Sue, uttering "ah" and continuing to re-perform the down-up pattern. (Note that, in this instance, the producer of the embodied action movement does NOT direct his gaze to the gesture; and neither participant will do so in the upcoming interaction).

Abe's performance fills a kind of slot his earlier utterances and word search have created for an appropriate next item due: some kind of display, vocalized or nonvocalized, of an activity engaged in by the girls in his crafts class. Abe performs for Sue a particular pattern of movement, what could be treated as a hand-sewing routine, that points toward a lexical item that is the object of his word search. Producing this embodied component of his turn at just this place of trouble also displays some expectation on his part that Sue will recognize it and will treat it accordingly as relevant. And she does, as evidenced by her next embodied action turn at line 3:

1 Abe: no:. thuh uh 'hh only boys. and the girls

2 a:re (0.2) [uh ah

[((EA-sewing[--------------------------->

[

3 Sue: [coo- [ SEWing

[((EA-sewing--->

Note again that when Abe utters his "ah" in line 2, and as he is also performing the embodied sewing routine for now the second time, he has turned his head and has re-directed his gaze toward Sue, displaying a possible invitation to Sue to collaborate in his word search, a readiness or openness to Sue's taking up and sharing the interactional floor with him (Goodwin and Goodwin 1986). And Sue immediately does so in her turn at line 3. With no gap whatsoever, and in overlap with Abe's continued (and second) performance of the nonvocalized component of his embodied action turn, Sue first starts to proffer a candidate word, "coo-", possibly projecting the lexical item "cooking." However, she suddenly cuts off her first utterance short of its completion with a glottal stop ("coo-") and offers a second candidate item, "SEWing." Sue's production of this second item displays that it has been locally occasioned by Abe's physical movements, their relevance to the task at hand, and the sequential slot for an appropriate next item due which they have generated.