BREAD: Re-Performance and Response

This fragment of interaction is taken from videotaped recordings made of a series of research gatherings known as "group data sessions." Participants in this fragment of interaction are communication scholars who conduct micro-analytic research into the organization and management of everyday human interaction. Participants in the group data sessions repeatedly watch brief segments from videotaped instances of naturally-occurring communication encounters and collaboratively analyze the instances.

What follows is, first, the transcript from the bit of "data" the group has been watching and analyzing. In it, we see two research subjects, a man and a woman, in a kitchen cooking and talking. Following that transcript is the transcript of a strip of interaction from the data session wherein the analysts were discussing the research video.

(Click on PLAY button for BREAD; their research data clip is first)

The Research Data (arrow indicates topic of later discussion)

1 Man: ...((dipping bread in bowl)) / (3.3)

2 Man: se- see =

3 Woman: = you can PUT MO:re in the BOW::L

4 Man: ((pops bread in mouth)) <---

5 (1.2)

6 Woman: (H)hhhh

 

Group Data Session

1 Rick: ... so he doe:s ((EA---(0.4)--->

2 [((--EA -------[-(1.0)---->))

3 Sam: [Um hmm [

4 Sandy: [hmm?

In drawing the attention of the other analysts to a particular moment in the interaction being studied (when the male subject pops the bread into his mouth), and to display part of his analysis of that moment, we see Rick using nonvocalized physical components to construct part of his turn. Rick initiates his turn with the incomplete grammatical phrase "so he doe:s". Then Rick stops talking, but he does not stop his action. Instead, we can see (and those co-participants visually attending to him can see) that he begins to re-perform a version (his version) of the man's popping-bread- into-mouth movements, among others.

One co-analyst in particular, Sam, has been attending closely to Rick's unfolding turn as a re-performance of the subject's movement. Just when Rick completes the actual popping-into-mouth movement -- that is, at the first projectably possible place of completion of Rick's action-turn -- Sam nods and utters "Um hmm" at line 3.

But it so happens that Rick is not through with his re-performance and he continues on performing his embodied version of what movements the man did next. When he reaches completion of this re-performing action-turn, Rick freezes the configuration briefly before dropping his hand back down to his side.

Therefore, this instance demonstrates again where a turn-holder constructs an action-turn using both vocalized and nonvocalized components such that completion of the action-turn occurs sometime well after the last spoken components have been uttered. It also demonstrates how a recipient, in this case Sam, can display his orientation to and treatment of a turn so-constructed. Sam initiates his uptake of next turn upon completion of one of the nonvocalized components, treating this place as a possible transition-relevant place rather than, for example, the place where Rick stopped talking.