LORENZA MONDADA

This project is anchored in linguistics, and more precisely grounded on interactional linguistics (IL), multimodal conversation analysis (CA), and ethnomethodology (EM) (Garfinkel 1967, Sacks 1972, 1992, Schegloff 2007), a research framework that investigates social interaction in a diversity of contexts with a special focus on the organization of situated action, and what makes it recognizable, intelligible and accountable. A distinctive contribution of this research paradigm has been to reveal and demonstrate the fundamental importance of time of linguistic resources for securing the intersubjectivity of actions. This project deals with temporality as the fundament of the interactional order, and specifically focuses on the temporality of embodied practices in talk and social interaction. While the timed dimension of language and grammar in interaction has been well described by CA and IL, embodied time has been much less systematically explored. This project fills this important gap, by offering a systematic conceptualization, grounded on empirical analyses, of the multiple temporalities of embodied actions in social interaction and their relations to language.

 

EMCA and IL have played an important role to reveal the temporal characteristics of language in interaction. Often treated as an abstract system of formal combinations in other paradigms, language has been tackled by interactional linguistics with regard to the constitutive emergent, incremental, progressive temporality of linguistic and grammatical resources: speakers build their turns-at-talk moment-by-moment, incrementally formatting them, mobilizing emergent syntactic and lexical elements (Auer 2007, 2009, Hakulinen & Selting 2002, Hopper 1998, Mushin & Pekarek Doehler 2021, Ochs, Schegloff & Thompson 1996), which progressively constitute possible recognizable patterns, constructions, or sentences. In turn, hearers orient, project, and adjust to these emergent structures in their responses. Together they progress interaction by building sequences of actions. More generally sequentiality builds on the temporality of emergent actions, its projectability and the responsivity it affords.

More recently, the resources considered when analyzing the formatting of actions have been expanded by making full usage of the features made available by video recordings in multimodal analyses. Multimodality encompasses a wide array of linguistic and embodied practices, the latter including facial expressions, gaze, gesture, body postures, movements and object manipulations (Deppermann & Streeck 2017, Goodwin 1981, 2017, Heath 1986, 2013, Mondada 2014, 2018, 2021, Streeck et al. 2011). Considering multimodality complexifies the vision of time: embodied resources have multiple, distinctive temporalities that can co-occur with talk, generating specific forms of projectability, and affording anticipated responses much earlier than talk. This affects the way we can conceptualize the emergent character of actions and their intelligibility, as well as the ongoing recognizability and the co-participants’ responses to them. More broadly, this raises new challenges for the conceptualization of sequentiality, complexifying and in some cases blurring the distinction between first and second actions, previous and next conducts, and the temporal unfolding of successive actions—imposing us to consider the temporal-sequential relations between diverse embodied practices unfolding together. While initial studies of language in interaction have emphasized the linear successivity of sequential and temporal relations between grammatical resources, multimodal interactional studies of language and the body have debated the complexity of successive and simultaneous relations between numerous resources mobilized at the same time. What is lacking in these discussions is a unified conceptualization of what I call the multiple temporalities of embodied details in talk and social interaction.

 

The project thus focuses on timed bodies, or the plurality of times characterizing bodies in interaction. It tackles fundamental topics of contemporary debates such as the coordination of multiple temporalities of embodied resources with talk, their consequence for the recognizability of actions, the definition of sequences and sequentiality, and more broadly the interactional order. It provides for the first systematic attempt to conceptualize and provide a unified analytical framework to these issues, by considering the maximal complexity of multimodality.

 

Theoretically, the project shows the complexity of temporality in interaction, which has been treated in very diverse terms: measurable chrono-metered homogeneized fragments of time (etic time: e.g. in pauses), projectable and anticipated time relationships (sequential time: e.g. in early responses drawing on ongoing projections), experienced situated relative moments embedded in the contingent occasioned temporality of situated actions (emic time: e.g. in adjustments to other actions), adaptations to imposed temporal constraints (external time: e.g. in actions having to respect strict clock conditions). While it is possible to recognize different forms of temporality in social interaction, their conceptual distinction and the understanding of how they distinctively shape the sequentiality of social interaction is crucial. Moreover the issue is how to articulate them in a coherent and consequential methodology for transcribing, annotating and analyzing these temporal instants, moments and spans. The issue is to address possible contractions within EMCA and IL implicit conceptions of time (e.g. measuring pauses but considering the emic sequential timing of responses).

 

Empirically, the project aims at providing for systematic analytical insights concerning different temporal phenomena partially treated in separate studies until now: WP1 deals with how sequence organization can be revisited by considering these multiple temporalities, in early action, anticipations, and micro-sequential reflexive adjustments between actions; WP2 deals with forms of simultaneity, showing that they are often actually constituted by more precise (micro-)sequential relations (as in choral responses, multiactivity, etc.); WP3 deals with movement and mobility across space as shaping a form of temporality to which the timing of other embodied actions and talk constantly adjust; WP4 considers actions with objects, re-temporalizing objects instead of treating them as inert things; WP5 considers actions done under time constraints (as in actions performed within limited and measured time).

 

To develop these theoretical and empirical aspects, the project uses the methodology of EMCA, based on video recordings of interactions in their actual settings, submitted to qualitative systematic analyses (Heath et al. 2010, Goodwin 2018, Mondada 2013). It relies on rich corpora of video data gathered by the PI during the last decades, internationally recognized for having built the most diversified set of video data currently available to one person/team and for her multimodal analyses. The project will also develop new methodological insights in video analysis, including how to document the multiple temporalities of bodies in video recordings, how to represent etic and emic temporalities in transcripts, how to zoom in relevant micro-temporal details, as well as how to use newest technological advances to do so.

 

In sum, providing for new conceptual, methodological, and analytical insights about timed bodies in interaction the project aims to [1] propose theoretical foundations for the study of social interaction and secure their conceptual consistence, [2] offer analytical advances for the unified analysis of very diverse temporal phenomena (sequentiality, simultaneity, multiactivity, mobility, materiality, urgency), [3] offer coherent methodological procedures and explore new technologies for the capture, annotation and analysis of timed bodies, [4] provide for crucial insights about issues of time impacting our society (e.g. time pressure and urgency, the imposition of exogenous time to tasks and actions and its consequences).

 

 

TEAM:

PI: Lorenza Mondada

2 post-doc researchers

2 research assistants and PhD candidates