Multimodal management of participation in everyday conversation: a conversation-analytic study

Participation in conversation is dynamic. People continuously negotiate their involvement and interact the organization of participation into being using multiple communicative modalities, including talk, gaze, and gesture. This study explores the relationships between talk, embodied and haptic resources in Mandarin-speaking everyday conversations. It uses multimodal conversation analysis to explore the functions of points and touches in a variety of interactional contexts. The dataset for this study is 334 minutes of real-time face-to-face triadic interactions among 15 native Mandarin speakers recruited from Sydney, Australia and Chengdu, China. Participants were recorded engaging in everyday conversation. These data were transcribed and analyzed using multimodal conversation analysis. Points and touches were found to have varied, but systematic functions. When they were used during self-initiated repair, they foreshadowed the missing turn component, and indicated responsibility for developing a repair solution. When a turn recipient pointed at a current speaker, their point indicated an upcoming bid for the floor and competition for speakership and epistemic authority. When a speaker pointed at a current recipient, it positioned them relative to the ongoing turn, and shaped how the recipient may take up the talk. When a participant touched another participant, it signals a potential shift in participation in their triadic interaction, with participants moving in and out of focal and non-focal roles. Finally, when a participant points at another participant in their triadic interaction, it may maintain or shift how all participants are contributing to it, resolving multiple competing trajectories that are developing in the interaction. This study generates new knowledge on how points and touches shape participation in interaction, and reveals their role in key interactional structures, including repair, turn-taking and sequence organization. It also generates new knowledge on Mandarin-speaking conversation from a multimodal conversation analysis perspective, contributing to a growing body of research on this topic.