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In everyday interaction, participants speak on their own behalf but may temporarily speak as or on behalf of a figure (i.e. past or fictional self, others or objects). This practice of ‘animation’ can be continued or extended by co-participants in responsive position, resulting in co-animation (Cantarutti, 2020) of the same figure. Animation relies on the successful ascription of roles, participation framework shifts and projected stances to either the here-and-now of interaction or the there-and-then of animated content. In turn, the recognition of a response as a co-animation requires the creation of similarity between animated contributions. Through a multimodal interactional linguistic analysis of 89 cases of co-animation, this paper discusses how participants jointly solve these interactional contextualisation ‘problems’ smoothly through multimodal gestalts of lexico-grammatical, prosodic and gestural detail.

This paper examines the interactional functions of the Spanish conversational particle vale in the self-recorded service encounter interactions of a bidialectal restaurant server in an Ecuadorian restaurant in Madrid whose clientele are, by and large, of Ecuadorian descent. The article details the sequential contexts in which vale is found as well as the grammatical and prosodic design of the turns where it is deployed, and contrasts its use with slots in the same dataset where alternatives were deployed instead. It also compares the findings with resonant descriptions from prior interactional studies of its English counterpart: okay, given the similarities in the interactional functions observed for vale. Vale was identified as a standalone particle in third position during the ordering activity bearing rising or falling intonation to register the (in)completeness of the order and contingencies around it, and also as a turn-final agreement-eliciting tag with rising-falling intonation appended to announcements of imminent service to welcome clients or serve the dishes.

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