SECTION 0.3

DOCUMENTATION

Representations of the following official documents appear:

1. Copyright Legend

2. Title Page

3. Dissertation Signature Page

4. Dedication

5. Acknowledgments

6. Abstract

7. Vita

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1. Copyright Legend

 

 

 

Copyright

by

Leslie Hope Jarmon

1996

 

 

 

2. Title Page

 

An Ecology of Embodied Interaction:

Turn-Taking and Interactional Syntax in

Face-to-Face Encounters

by

Leslie Hope Jarmon, B.A., M.A.

 

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

August 1996

 

 

 

3. Dissertation Signature Page

 

An Ecology of Embodied Interaction:

Turn-Taking and Interactional Syntax in

Face-to-Face Encounters

 

 

 

Approved by

Dissertation Committee:

Robert Hopper, Supervisor

Madeline Maxwell

Lynn Miller

Joni Jones

Keith Walters

 

 

4. This Work Is Dedicated To:

 

 

JOYCE HOPE JARMON,

my friend and my mother

 

 

 

 

5. Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me directly or indirectly.

I would like to begin by thanking Erica Hoffman and Susan Corbin for giving me permission to use fragments of their video data in this study.

I offer profound gratitude to the members of my extended family and friends who have let themselves be videotaped relentlessly for this research. Spencer Jarmon, my brother, composes beautiful music and graciously created "laconica" for this project.

I am grateful to my committee members, Madeline Maxwell, Lynn Miller, Joni Jones, and Keith Walters, for their teaching, for their support and encouragement of this project, and for their kindness when I was ill. To Paul Gray, Graduate Advisor, who never let an opportunity to rally my spirits pass unheeded, I owe special thanks.

The Department of Speech Communication staff, Lora Maldonado, Deanna Matthews and Margaret Surratt manage to provide incredible support under incredible duress, and I thank them deeply for their personal friendship and support day-to-day, everyday.

The members of the Graduate Assembly and especially Vice-President and Dean Teresa Sullivan receive special recognition for engaging the challenge of multimedia technology in scholarly enterprises and for granting me permission to proceed with this project. Other supporters in various departments at the University of Texas who have provided support and to whom I am grateful include Tim Rowe, Coco Kishi, John Wheat, Belinda Gonzalez Lehmkuhle, and Richard Mendez and his staff.

In the summer of 1992, I took a course with Jurgen Streeck in video-ethnography, and being behind the camera changed the way I see. In the summer of 1993, Sandy Stone played for me a stamp-size Quicktime movie on her computer, and my life has not been the same since. I am deeply grateful to her for that and for her friendship. Two kind-spirited guides merit special recognition: Conrad Solis, who first introduced me to Adobe Premiere, and Tracy Prater, who taught me about digitizing boards. I am also grateful to Yakov Sharir, who introduced me to LifeForms, and to Gary Thompson of Apple, who has provided technical assistance and enthusiasm all along the way. Very special thanks are extended to David Avila, interface-designer par excellence, at Human Code and Digital Arts, for his creativity and generosity of spirit, and to the others at Human Code/CDF, especially David and John Stansbury, who helped make final realization of this project possible. The outside cover for the CD-ROM was graciously designed by Jake Jarmon and Spencer Jarmon, and deep thanks are extended to both.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to my friends and colleagues Erica Hoffman, Curt LeBaron, Susan Corbin, JoAnn McKenzie, Dan Modaff, Charlotte Jones, and Tommy Darwin for their intellectual insights and most especially for their on-going spiritual support. Jeff Stringer and Amy Darnell are especially thanked for teaching my classes when I could not.

I am deeply indebted to two groups of nurturers: the medical personnel who have seen me through the last year, and my friends/family at Taos Cooperative, who have provided me with food, friendship, and conversational data for four years.

Very profound gratitude and affection are extended to my dissertation supervisor, Robert Hopper, whose support and willingness to take a chance enabled us to get permission to go ahead with this CD-ROM project. I thank him deeply for introducing me to the micro-universe of human interaction, for sharing with me his love of music, and for being here.

Finally, I want to thank my friend and mother, Joyce Jarmon, without whose support this project -- or anything else I have ever tried to do -- would never have unfolded.

 

 

 

 

6. Abstract

 

An Ecology of Embodied Interaction:

Turn-Taking and Interactional Syntax in

Face-to-Face Encounters

by

Leslie Hope Jarmon, PhD.

The University of Texas at Austin

Supervisor: Robert Hopper

 

This dissertation presents micro-analyses of how embodied actions exhibit orderliness and function as elemental and recurrent components of participants' turns in face-to-face interaction. That embodied actions recurrently constitute turns and turn-components in interaction merits that they be specified within an expanding description of the turn-taking system.

The occurrence of embodied actions as turns interestingly problematizes the fundamental concepts of turn-constructional unit, projectability, turn completion, and turn overlap. Furthermore, how embodied actions actually work in face-to-face interaction invites a closer examination of the performing body as a shared communicative resource. Co-presence entails that, like voices for speaking, bodies for acting are immediately perceptually available to interactants in service to on-going lines of activity as well as to the construction of a turn.

The methodology of conversation analysis has been used to examine videotaped instances of naturally-occurring interaction. Data is collected, closely transcribed, repeatedly observed, and analyzed for patterns oriented to by participants themselves. Collections of instances exhibiting similar phenomena are developed and research findings are shared with other scholars of human interaction. Formulated from empirical observation and analyses of recurrent patterns of behavior in actual instances, three propositions are presented in this study:

Proposition One: Embodied actions constitute a fifth

domain of turn-construction unit types within the turn-taking

system. Embodied action-turns thrive in an interactional

ecology that includes both visual-spatial and vocal-aural

domains. Actual occurrences from the data show their use

as construction units in turns in adjacency-pair, assessment,

and repair sequences, and demonstrate co-participants'

unremarkable and recurrent use of embodied action-units

as turns.

Proposition Two: In addition to speech, at least three

additional shared communicative resources, with

recognizable underlying order, form, and structure, are

available to co-present interactants and can contribute to

the projectability of embodied action-turns: the body metric;

the order exhibited in the configuring of a turn over time; and

recognizable embodied practices from everyday life.

Proposition Three: The recurrence of embodied action-turns

provides additional evidence for a syntax-for-interaction,

extending quasi-linguistic analysis beyond vocalics and

centering analysis on communicative actions embedded

within situated activities. A syntax-for-interaction takes into

account the practices of human communication and the

multiple resources, sequential structures, and organizing

systems co-present participants have at hand for

constituting and managing their lines of activity in

interaction.

The dissertation is available only on CD-ROM; the phenomenon under investigation -- nonvocalized embodied actions in co-present human interaction -- lend themselves to examination through the use of multimedia technology because of their visual, sequential, and dynamic character. Only through a medium capable of presenting these essential features are we able to share such data and the findings resulting from its research; form and content are interwoven. New features include a collection of instances from the videotaped data in the form of interactive digital movies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. Vita

VITA

Leslie Hope Jarmon was born in Corpus Christi, Texas on October 16, 1952, the daughter of Joyce Hope Jarmon and Jake Jarmon, Jr. After completing her work at W. B. Ray High School, Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1970, she entered the University of Texas at Austin. She received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. She worked for the United States Peace Corps from 1982 to 1987. She received a Masters of Arts degree from Corpus Christi State University in 1992, and she entered the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in the summer that same year.

Permanent Address:

842 Retama

Corpus Christi, Texas 78408

This dissertation was created on CD-ROM by the author.