If-Clauses, Their Grammatical Consequents, and Their Embodied Consequence: Organizing Joint Attention in Guided Tours

Abstract

In linguistics, if-clauses have attracted the interest of scholars working on syntax, typology and pragmatics alike. This article examines if-clauses as a resource available to tour guides for reorienting the visitors’ visual attention towards an object of interest. The data stem from 11 video-recorded tours in Italian, French, German and Dutch (interpreted into Flemish Sign Language). In this setting, guides recurrently use if-clauses to organize a joint focus of attention, by soliciting the visitors to bodily and visually rearrange. These clauses occur in combination with verbs of vision (e.g., to look), or relating to movement in space (e.g., to turn around). Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study pursues three interrelated objectives: 1) it examines the grammatical relationship that speakers establish between the if-clause and the projected main clause; 2) it analyzes the embodied conduct of participants in the accomplishment of if/then-constructions; 3) it describes if-clauses as grammatical resources with a twofold projection potential: a vocal-grammatical projection enabling the guide (or the addressees) to achieve a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which solicits visitors to accomplish a situationally relevant action, such as reorienting gaze towards an object of interest. These projections do not run independently from each other. The analysis shows how, while producing an if-clause, guides adjust their emerging talk—through pauses, expansions and restarts—to the visitors’ co-occurring spatial repositioning. These practices are described as micro-sequential adjustments that reflexively affect turn-construction and embodied compliance. In addressing the above phenomena and questions, this article highlights the fundamentally adaptive, situated and action-sensitive nature of grammar.

The situated deployment of the Italian presentative (e) hai. . ., ‘(and) you have. . .’ within routinized multimodal Gestalts in route mapping with visually impaired climbers

“…Extract 1, l. 11), hai -presentative constructions explicitly address the recipient (the athlete) and invite them to accomplish relevant embodied actions. As a projecting component, (e) hai is shown to exhibit a twofold projection potential (De Stefani, 2021): a syntactic projection enabling the guide to produce a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which invites the athlete to join in coordinated embodied action with the guide. The organization of these syntactic and embodied components follows a systematic trajectory which we have illustrated in Table 1.…”

“…The practical constraints associated with guiding others’ perception may be reflected in the choice of specific syntactic formats that speakers use to invite the audience to physically orient themselves toward a target phenomenon. For example, drawing on data from guided tours, De Stefani (2021) investigates how guides resort to if- clauses such as ‘if you look at the ground’ to solicit visitors to bodily and visually reorient toward an object of interest, adjusting the progressivity of their ongoing turn-construction (i.e. the delivery of the consequent then- clause such as ‘you see that there is.…”

“….] to achieve a grammatically adequate turn-continuation, and an embodied-action projection, which solicits visitors to accomplish a situationally relevant action’ (De Stefani, 2021: 1). Similarly, the present article focuses on how the guide employs e hai ‘and you have’ both to initiate a presentative construction that introduces an object of interest (i.e.…”

Pseudo-clefts in Italian talk-in-interaction and in interaction-as-represented

“…A turn starting with quello che (see § 2.1) makes a specific syntactic continuation expectable. In other words, it establishes a projection (Auer, 2005;Corminboeuf and Horlacher, 2016;De Stefani, 2021b) about the possibly ensuing syntactic trajectory. In using this resource, a speaker mobilizes the grammatical possibilities available in their language (grammar as a resource), but what will eventually be produced is situationally and interactionally contingent (grammar as an accomplishment).…”

“…Early interactional research on grammar in settings of interaction has focused both on the concept of sentence, which Goodwin (1979) has shown to be interactionally accomplished, and on recurrent syntactic formats, such as left-dislocations, which Duranti and Ochs (1979) have studied for Italian, or if/then-constructions (Lerner, 1991;De Stefani, 2021b). Systematic studies of grammar in interactional talk have been carried out since the 1990s.…”