How to Disengage: Suspension, Body Torque, and Repair

ABSTRACT

This article uses conversation analysis to study other-initiated repair in multiactivity situations. The article focuses on two aspects of the repair initiator’s embodied conduct directly connected to the initiator’s involvement in multiactivity: body torque and the suspension of a parallel manual activity. The analysis reveals how the body torque and suspension of manual activity, when co-occurring with other-initiations of repair, display the OIR-speaker’s temporary disengagement from the manual activity and how this embodied conduct communicates downward prioritization of the manual activity and increased involvement in the interaction. This article shows that, to participants in a conversation and simultaneously involved in multiactivity, solving interactional trouble is prioritized over the progression of the parallel manual task and that this hierarchization of activities displays a strong preference toward restoration and maintenance of intersubjectivity. Data are in English and in French with English translation.

Notes

¹ The tags for the multimodality lines in the transcript are to be interpreted as follows: e.g., llb = Lloyd’s body orientation; shb = Shayna’s body orientation; llm = Lloyd’s manual action, etc. All the transcripts in this article will follow the same pattern.

² Here, anm = Anna’s manual action; atb = Antoine’s body orientation, etc.

³ “Stand-alone quoi (what) or comment (what) are commonly used to address problems of hearing, resulting in the prior speaker repeating the entire turn” (Maheux-Pelletier & Golato, 2003, as cited in Golato & Golato, 2015).

⁴ See Raymond and Lerner (2014) for retarding as a form of activity adjustment for “sustaining a visible commitment to an erstwhile ongoing course of action while pursuing a second course of action” (p. 243).

⁵ Another understanding check occurs as a second repair initiation in Excerpt 5, when the OIR speaker is already in a torqued position and gazing at the TS speaker.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Academy of Finland as part of the author’s doctoral dissertation in the research project iTask: Linguistics and Embodied Features of Interactional Multitasking (project number 287219).