Multimodal Demonstrations of Understanding of Visible, Imagined, and Tactile Objects in Guided Tours

ABSTRACT

How do people demonstrate that they have fully appreciated the qualities of an object they have been invited to inspect? If the features are visible, verbal assessment is comparatively straightforward, but appreciating tactile or imagined qualities requires more discursive work. To explore the ways in which people show their understanding of these underresearched modalities of objects, we analyze interactions between guides and visitors in guided tours. Such tours are a perspicuous setting, as they are environments where artifacts can be viewed, conceptualized, and sometimes touched and handled. We identify the multimodal resources that guides and visitors use. Data are in Japanese with English translation.

Notes

¹ Although the primary speaker and recipient may shift depending on the situation, we use these terms as normatively expected institutional roles and obligations for categories associated with particular practices, such as a guide (Mondada, 2013).

² The primary investigator of the project is Keiichi Yamazaki of Saitama University.

³ The guide conveyed, “In those days, there was nothing like a refrigerator, so, for example, food was put in this type of thing (=cabinet) so that it wouldn’t go bad” (tooji reezooko toka, sooyuu mono wa nakatta node, tatoeba shokuryoohin o kusaranai yooni kooyuu moni ni oite arimasita).

⁴ Photo (“First home of the Japanese American National Museum at First and Central”) by Infernalfox, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23310278. Slightly modified.

⁵ When sugoi stands alone, it is often employed as an exclamatory expression or a response cry wow, rather than an adjective ‘amazing.’