This article examines how participants coordinate concurrent activities in hair salon interactions and during driving lessons. In both settings, participants devote considerable time to chatting about mundane topics. This sort of conversation has traditionally been studied as an instance of small talk. The first part of the article retraces the epistemological origins of this notion. The analytical section shows how an analysis based on talk alone may lead researchers to distinguish small talk from task-directed talk, in line with previous studies. The subsequent analysis of the participants’ multimodal conduct reveals that what we call mundane talk is a social activity that participants coordinate with multiple other co-occurring courses of (professional) action. The article subsequently zeroes in on task-directed first pair parts and shows how, on occasion, participants prioritize certain activities over others. The analyses draw on video data of interactions that have taken place in French and Italian and are carried out with conversation analytic methods.

This monograph examines how language contributes to the social coordination of actions in talk-in-interaction. Focusing on a set of frequently used constructions in French (leftdislocation, right-dislocation, topicalization, and hanging topic), the study provides an empirically rich contribution to the understanding of grammar as thoroughly temporal, emergent, and contingent upon its use in social interaction. Based on data from a range of everyday interactions, the authors investigate speakers' use of these constructions as resources for organizing social interaction, showing how speakers continuously adapt, revise, and extend grammatical trajectories in real time in response to local contingencies. The book is designed to be both informative for the specialized scholar and accessible to the graduate student familiar with conversation analysis and/or interactional linguistics.

Drawing on a corpus of French radio phone-in confidential chats, this paper deals with the resources that participants recurrently employ to get back to a prior course of action following age-inquiry sequences. It might be expected that the age sequence occurs predominantly during the initial, opening part of the phone-call, as part of the caller’s identification sequence. Although such occurrences can be found, the age sequence is produced overwhelmingly after the introduction of the reason for call or after a pre- announcement of it. The way in which participants link back to the activity preceding the age sequence is related to the sequential placement of the age sequence as well as to the ‘authorship’ of its initiation and termination. Backlinking turns may therefore be analyzed with respect to their pragmatic effects (as doing restart, continuation, disjunction etc.) and with regard to the syntax and the linguistic units that speakers employ to achieve these effects.

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