Elwys De Stefani

Reorganizing Mobile Formations: When “Guided” Participants Initiate Reorientations in Guided Tours

Guided tours are a perspicuous setting for the study of mobile formations. Guided visits are characterized by mobile phases in which the group moves forward, alternating with moments in which participants adopt a more stationary, object-focused positioning. In this article, we pay attention to specific ways of walking from one point to another as a mobile formation: We focus on mobile reorientations of the group changing the initially projected trajectory. This particular movement allows us to observe key features of mobile formations: how they are initiated, by whom, with which resources. We sketch a systematic study of multimodal practices through which various kinds of participants initiate a reorientation of the group, with a particular focus on the category of the participants initiating the reorientation (the “guide” vs. the “guided”), on the action they achieve at the beginning of a sequence in order to do so (questions, noticings, comments), and on the multimodal resources they use.

Time and emergence in grammar : dislocation, topicalization and hanging topic in French talk-in-interaction

This monograph examines how language contributes to the social coordination of actions in talk-in-interaction. Focusing on a set of frequently used constructions in French (left-dislocation, right-dislocation, topicalization, and hanging topic), the study provides an empirically rich contribution to the understanding of grammar as thoroughly temporal, emergent, and contingent upon its use in social interaction. Based on data from a range of everyday interactions, the authors investigate speakers’ use of these constructions as resources for organizing social interaction, showing how speakers continuously adapt, revise, and extend grammatical trajectories in real time in response to local contingencies. The book is designed to be both informative for the specialized scholar and accessible to the graduate student familiar with conversation analysis and/or interactional linguistics.

Encounters in Public Space: How Acquainted Versus Unacquainted Persons Establish Social and Spatial Arrangements

ABSTRACT This article studies how people enter into interactions in public space by examining casual encounters initiated either by strangers or acquainted persons. It contributes to the study of openings of interactions in public space from a conversation analytic perspective. The analysis reveals systematic similarities and differences between these two kinds of encounters, with regard to the prospective participants’ recognition, identification, and categorization, their spatial approach, the absence vs. presence of greetings, the delivery of a reason for the encounter vs. the manifestation of the social relation, and the shaping of the embodied participation framework. Data are in French and Italian with English translations.

Mundane talk at work: Multiactivity in interactions between professionals and their clientele:

This article examines how participants coordinate concurrent activities in hair salon interactions and during driving lessons. In both settings, participants devote considerable time to chatting about mundane topics. This sort of conversation has traditionally been studied as an instance of small talk. The first part of the article retraces the epistemological origins of this notion. The analytical section shows how an analysis based on talk alone may lead researchers to distinguish small talk from task-directed talk, in line with previous studies. The subsequent analysis of the participants’ multimodal conduct reveals that what we call mundane talk is a social activity that participants coordinate with multiple other co-occurring courses of (professional) action. The article subsequently zeroes in on task-directed first pair parts and shows how, on occasion, participants prioritize certain activities over others. The analyses draw on video data of interactions that have taken place in French and Italian and are carried out with conversation analytic methods.

Who's the expert? Negotiating competence and authority in guided tours

Guided tours are a “perspicuous setting” (Garfinkel & Wieder 1992) both for the study of asymmetries in professional contexts of interaction as well as for the analysis of how participants negotiate identities, categories and expertise. At first glance, the categorial distinction between “guide” and “guided” participants appears to be clear-cut. However, analyses of video recorded tours taking place in various sites show that the taken-for-granted authority, expertise and thus identity of the “guide” is repeatedly challenged by his or her co-participants. Based on conversation analytic methods, in this chapter we focus on sequences of interaction in which the participants compete for epistemic authority. We show how such competition emerges, how participants handle it, and how it is eventually solved.