SECTION 3.4.1

 

VISUAL ATTENTION: CO-PARTICIPANTS SHOW AND SEE

 

In the on-going flow of face-to-face interaction, embodied actions are resources that can be produced by performers, as well as attended to, recognized during the course of their unfolding, and oriented to quite precisely by recipients. In tracking the fine-grained attentive behavior that allows participants to employ embodied actions in the construction of their turns, we build on Jefferson's observation that participants recurrently display aural attention to "particles" or tiny "objects", especially in transition-relevant places where overlap of speakers may occur; in her study, objects lie in the auditory domain and include consonants, inbreaths, and "a bit of silence" (1986, 167).

The concept of speech overlap, then, has been used to characterize occasions wherein two or more co-participants produce turns or parts of turns simultaneously. Problems may or may not ensue as a result of overlapping turns. Recurrently, participants collaboratively resolve instances of overlap such that one interactant retains the floor; a common strategy is for one of the overlapping parties to drop out or stop producing a turn (Jefferson 1986), or to drop out and then continue with what Lerner has termed a "delayed completion" (1989, 173). Observation of this behavior in everyday encounters and detailed analysis of the turn-taking system has led analysts to conclude that there is, roughly speaking, a conversational practice or rule that there be one speaker at a time.

But what happens to the notion of overlap and to a one-speaker-at-a-time rule when turns are constituted by nonvocalized, embodied action construction components? Observation of actual instances reveals that co-present interactants make use of their performing bodies as communicative resources and that they may produce embodied action-turns in on-going lines of activity DURING speech by self or others. Examination of occurrences of overlap suggests a new notion of turn overlap that gets managed by participants in different ways than speech overlap.

A first observation, demonstrated by the examples below, is that the interactants do not display any indication that the overlap of embodied actions with speech is problematic for them; that is, we can observe nothing marked in their treatment of the overlap. Neither, for example, drops out; nor is there a problem, for example of mis-hearing due to the overlap.

What we as analysts can observe in all of the following examples is that one turn-holder suddenly produces a display of orientation to something -- that is, produces a new turn construction unit -- that has been locally occasioned not by some bit of talk but rather by a nonvocalized, embodied action-turn produced in overlap by a co-interactant for that recipient.