Bodily-Visual Practices and Turn Continuation

Abstract

This article considers points in turn construction where conversation researchers have shown that talk routinely continues beyond possible turn completion, but where bodily-visual behavior doing such turn extension work is found. The bodily-visual behaviors examined share many features with verbal turn extensions, but it is argued that embodied movements have distinct properties that make them well-suited for specific kinds of social action, including stance display and by-play in relation to simultaneous verbal turns and sequences.

Notes

¹In this article, we use the term verbal to indicate both lexico-grammatical and prosodic formulations.

²We acknowledge that, as part of a symposium and special issue on “turn continuation,” our article does indeed privilege the verbal, as our point of departure in our research process involved attending to the possible ends of verbal turns (i.e., the site for turn extensions as examined in previous research).

³We return to this point in our conclusion.

⁴It comes out later (beyond the extracts) that Abbie's grandparents were refugees from Hungary, who settled in Norway after the 1956 uprising in Hungary.

⁵See Ford (2008) for a fuller analysis of this sequence.

⁶Our use of the word types implies that each type has several exemplars; this is indeed the case, although we have had space to illustrate only one instance of each type in this article. We hope that our typology will encourage further research into the ways in which the body is used in formulating turn extensions.