Dialogic Embodied Action: Using Gesture to Organize Sequence and Participation in Instructional Interaction

Interactional analysts have long argued for the importance of tying techniques, which function to connect the current speaker's utterance to the actions of a previous speaker, in the organization of turns at talk (M. H. Goodwin, 1990 Goodwin, M. H. 1990. He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among Black children, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]; Sacks, 1992c Sacks, H. 1992c. “Tying rules”. In Lectures on conversation: Volume 2, Edited by: Sacks, H. 150–162. Oxford, , England: Blackwell. [Google Scholar]). The organization of embodied actions through such dialogic tying, however, has received far less attention, a gap addressed by this article in its examination of one nonverbal tying technique: dialogic embodied action. In this phenomenon, coparticipants purposefully take up and selectively reproduce particular features of one another's gestures and instrumental actions. Drawing on data from instructional interactions at a bicycle-repair shop, the analysis demonstrates that focusing on the selectivity of such reproductions elucidates two functions of these dialogic actions: (a) to organize intersubjective engagement, facilitating coparticipants' enactment of aligned participant roles and (b) to structure sequential organization through actions that are visibly constituted as prior to other actions. [Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Research on Language and Social Interaction for the following free supplemental resource(s): video clips.]