Securing Recipiency in Workplace Meetings: Multimodal Practices

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Publishers site:http://dis.sagepub.com/content/14/1/11.abstract

Abstract

As multiparty interactions with single courses of coordinated action, workplace meetings placeparticular interactional demands on participants who are not primary speakers (e.g. not chairs) asthey work to initiate turns and to interactively coordinate with displays of recipiency from coparticipants.Drawing from a corpus of 26 hours of videotaped workplace meetings in a midsizedUS city, this article reports on multimodal practices – phonetic, prosodic, and bodily-visual – usedfor coordinating turn transition and for consolidating recipiency in these specialized speechexchange systems. Practices used by self-selecting non-primary speakers as they secure turns inmeetings include displays of close monitoring of current speakers’ emerging turn structure,displays of heightened interest as current turns approach possible completion, and turn initiationpractices designed to pursue and, in a fine-tuned manner, coordinate with displays of recipiencyon the parts of other participants as well as from reflexively constructed ‘target’ recipients. Byattending to bodily-visual action, as well as phonetics and prosody, this study contributes toexpanding accounts for turn taking beyond traditional word-based grammar (i.e. lexicon andsyntax).

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Linguistics

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