Pentti Haddington

Interaction and mobility : language and the body in motion

How do people use language, gestures and the materialenvironment around themfor interacting in mobile situations? Interaction and Mobility brings together international scholars who use video-recordings from real-life everyday settings to study how people interact in diverse mobile situations as part of activities such as walking, driving, flying, dancing and gaming. This book isvaluablefor anyone interested in multimodal interaction and mobility.

Interaction between road users: offering space in traffic

This article studies how drivers offer space to other road users. The article builds on cases of space-offering collected from an audio-video corpus of real-life and real-time traffic recorded in Britain. It draws on Goffman’s research on mobile encounters, Mondada’s concept of “interactional space,” and a methodology used to study the organization of multimodal and embodied social interaction. Space-offering is a practice through which road users negotiate their spatial and mobile copresence. They may communicate this by positioning themselves in space in different ways or by drawing on mutual gaze, gestures, the car’s technology, or other multimodal resources. As road users offer space to one another, they create “space” as a members’ phenomenon and construct the flow of traffic collaboratively and in situ.

Moving Together: Mobile Formations in Interaction

As we strolled down the city’s sidewalks, Xipoogi walked behind me, with Xaboasi behind him. I slowed down to let them catch up. They slowed down too. I slowed down more. Ditto. I stopped. They stopped. They simply would not walk beside me, not even when I asked them to. This makes sense on a narrow jungle path. [. . .] In the city, though, walking abreast, while spatially inefficient, allows the walkers to converse more easily and to be perceived as a group. I smiled about our walking arrangement.

Demonstrations in Sports Training: Communicating a Technique through Parsing and the Return-Practice in the Budo Class

Abstract Demonstrating a sports technique to students presents coaches and teachers a practical challenge: How to communicate a multi-phased and fleeting movement of the body effectively and in a manner which also makes clear the temporal relation of the individual phases of the movement? By using video-based methods and video recordings collected in budo sports training, this paper illustrates how teachers parse a complicated and fast-paced technique into individual steps by resorting to talk and embodied means. Furthermore, we examine how the teachers can move back and forth between these steps with an interactional practice we call ‘return-practice’. By employing this practice, the teachers provide additional information regarding particular steps, highlight the simultaneous nature of particular body movements, demonstrate alternative ways of performing the technique, and illustrate the consequences of the incorrect performance of these steps. The linguistic design of the ‘return-practice’ is shown to differ in the above four functions.

Driven by a Social and Interactional Routine: Responding to a Mobile Phone Summons in a Car

The article reports findings from a qualitative study that draws on the methods of conversation analysis and on audio-video recordings of ordinary, real-life, non-experimental driving situations. The article shows what happens in a car after a mobile phone summons, i.e., the initial ring or beep of a car occupant’s phone. It identifies three phases (i.e., orienting to, locating and handling a phone) that follow the summons and lead to an attempt at verbally responding to the summons. It is shown that the ringing of a phone (indicating an incoming call) or the beeping of a phone (indicating an incoming text message), as a socially and interactionally significant action, is treated as requiring a more or less immediate response. It is argued that this routinization of responding to a summons explains drivers’, and possible passengers,’ use of a mobile phone while traveling in a car.