The Interdependence of Bodily Demonstrations and Clausal Syntax

Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations

“…Vocalizations have been shown to occur in enactments (such as response cries) and "body quotes" in interaction (Streeck, 2002;Sidnell, 2006;Fox and Robles 2010). They can also accomplish the crucial actions of assessing and directing in music and dance instruction (Keevallik 2013;Tolins 2013). The term bodily-vocal demonstration used for the phenomenon in the current study underlines the primacy of the embodied display, suggesting a gentle boundary between bodily-vocal demonstrations and emotional vocal displays, including response cries, as discussed in e.g.…”

“…It has been argued that there are systematic ways of completing a TCU with an embodied demonstration, after the syntax is discontinued at a point where it still projects more to come (Keevallik, 2013). The current section focuses on a subset of these, showing that bodily-vocal demonstrations in particular can bring a TCU to a completion.…”

“…The resulting constructions involve a syntactic initiation and an embodied completion: they are syntactic-bodily units (Keevallik, 2013). On the one hand, vocalizations are deployed to keep the turn space that may otherwise be subject to transition, but on the other, there are activity-specific reasons for using the vocal tract simultaneously with the bodily demonstration.…”

“…It is argued that these demonstrations are turn-organized and by extension, other kinds of bodily displays may be too, even when they are accompanied by silence. Pauses in the stream of talk may in fact be filled with segments of embodied action that build interactional units, as is nicely shown by Seo and Koshik (2010) or bring them to a recognizable completion, as argued in Keevallik (2013).…”

“…This followed from the authors' distinct interest in conversation and from working with telephone data. Later research has underlined the dynamic nature of turns as opportunities for different actors to participate in (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1987;Hayashi, 2005;Iwasaki, 2011), and suggested that units can be built by combining clausal syntax and bodilu demonstrations (Keevallik, 2013). Interactional linguists have started to talk about on-line units that are sensitive to local contingencies and constantly available for renegotiation (Ford, 2004;Auer, 2005;Linell, 2013).…”