Chapter 7. Joint Searches Without Getting the Actual Word
7.3 Multimodal Resources in Joint Solution
7.3.3 Embodied Actions as Sufficient Reference
Excerpt 17 examines how participants make the relevance of their talk and embodied actions in building a concept as a sufficient reference to resolve a word search. The segment in below is from the same conversation as Excerpt 16. Preceding this segment, Mus, Lea and Ann were talking about holiday places, and then Ann says that she will avoid going to places like forests due to her experience having bad dreams out of a fear of insects. As Ann begins to describe the insects that she saw in her dreams, she starts to show trouble in her talk (line 1).
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Excerpt 17: Krok
(Ann: Vietnam; Mus: Malaysia; Lea: Kazakhstan)
1 ANN: but- cuz │there's a picture │the::: [I don't know=
│ ((Ann gazes at Mus and gestures with her hand. [Fig. 7.24] ))
│ ((Ann shifts gaze downwards))
Figure 7.24
2 MUS: │[°oh:.°
│ ((Mus gazes at her food))
3 ANN: │=the:: °krok°(0.5) °krok?°
│((Ann furrows eye brows and gazes at Mus. [Fig. 7.25] ))
Figure 7.25
4 (0.9)
5 MUS: the:::
((Mus keeps gaze on Ann))
6 ANN: °the kro:k? what's the-°
7 (0.6)
8 MUS: mm:: (0.4) │the krok.
│ ((Mus shifts gaze to Lea.))
9 (0.6)
((Lea turns to gaze at Ann while both Ann and Mus gaze at each other. [Fig. 7.26] ))
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10 ANN: I don't kno:w (0.1) [°ho:w,° 11 MUS: [oka:y.
12 (0.2)
13 ANN: you know where the bro::wn (0.2)│>.HH< I think of
│ ((Ann shifts gaze away from Mus and lifts both shoulders upwards & clasps both
hands.))
14 it I'm already:: │ee=
│((Ann lifts both shoulders upwards and Lea gazes upwards.
[Fig. 7.27] ))
Figure 7.27
15 MUS: =>okay okay<
((Mus moves her posture backwards and waves her hand. [Fig. 7.28] ))
Figure 7.28
16 (0.2)
17 MUS: [haha ]
18 ANN: [it's-] I don't know how to spe:ll it
19 (0.4)
20 ANN: │see:: ↑ar:: [o- ]
│ ((Ann shifts gaze from Mus to Lea.))
21 LEA: [what] is it like?
22 (0.5)
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24 (0.4)
((Lea gestures with her left-hand fingers. [Fig. 7.29] ))
Figure 7.29
25 ANN: it's like ↑bro::wn (.) it's the insect (.) it lives
26 for a very lo:ng ti::me.
27 (1.5)
28 ANN: it's ve::ry di:rty.
29 (0.4)
30 ANN: it rea:lly dirty.
31 (0.9)
32 MUS: mm: ↓
((Mus makes disgusted facial gestures while both Lea and Ann gaze at her. ))
33 (0.6)
34 ANN: I don't know how to say it,
((Lea furrows her brows as she gazes at Mus & lifts her shoulders upwards. ))
35 MUS: Hahaha
36 ANN: I’m sure you kno::w but any[way
37 LEA: [ya:h
38 (0.3)
39 LEA: [>maybe<]
40 ANN: [because]of ↑tha:t animal that come(.) I got
41 really upset with insect
42 (1.8)
((Lea gulps her drink as her body posture moves upwards & downwards while sitting still. Ann makes a disgusted facial gesture. ))
43 ANN: that's wh:y I- I- I canno:t vi:sit fo:rest 44 MUS: ha[hahaha ha ha ]
45 ANN: [that's my conclu:]sion 46 MUS: HAHA HAHA [haha haha 48 ANN: [ca:nnot
49 (0.2)
50 ANN: forest is the no:: 51 MUS: HAHAhahaha
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In line 1, Ann brings her right hand forward towards Mus and begins gesturing her finger as she gazes at Mus and says “there's a picture”, as shown in Figure 7.24. Ann keeps her hand gestures in the same position and begins to shift her gaze downwards while she elongates the vowel sound “the:::”, indicating that she is
launching her word search, and then she explicitly expresses her trouble by saying “[I
don't know=”. When Ann elongates her word “the:::”, Mus, who is gazing
downwards at her food, responds in a soft voice with a token response “[°oh:.°” (line 2), and Mus response token overlaps with Ann’s end of utterance in line 1. Mus’ change-of-stage response token “oh” could suggest that she is responding to Ann’s informing (Heritage, 1984). Following Ann’s speech perturbation and her explicit trouble displaying her word search, launched in line 1, she continues holding her hand and begins to furrow her eyebrow and say “=the:: °krok°(0.5) °krok?°”, at which point both she and Mus show gaze at each other.
It is observed that as Ann produces the lexical item “krok” she shows
uncertainty for her candidate solution, which she has uttered in a softer voice, pauses, and then repeats the word with a rising intonation as she gestures her hands and settles her gaze on Mus (Figure 7.25). A possible explanation for Ann’s production of her candidate solution in a soft voice, a pause, and a rising intonation is her ‘try-marking’ it (Sacks and Schegloff, 1979) and ‘flagging for markedness’ (Firth, 2009).
It is observed that in the long, 0.9 second pause in line 4 both Ann and Mus continue to keep their gaze on each other. In the subsequent line, Mus utters an
elongated vowel sound as she says “the:::” (line 5), a speech perturbation indicating that there is trouble in the talk. It is not known if Mus’ indication of trouble is perhaps displaying her uncertainty at Ann’s proposed candidate solution or perhaps seeking clarification from Ann for a possible mishearing. However, as Mus keeps her gaze on Ann, this indicates that she is extending an invitation for Ann to help her (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1986). As such, in line 6 Ann repeats in a soft voice her candidate solution in an upward intonation as she overtly requests help from Mus with “what is” (equivalent to the use of the formulaic expression “how can I say” and “Wh-” formulation, (see Brouwer, 2003; Jung, 2004).
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Following Ann’s repetition of her candidate item and her request for Mus’s co- participation, Mus then repeats the word as she says “the krok” in line 8 and shifts her gaze towards Lea. At this point, Mus gazes at Lea to invite her to co-participate in the search sequence. Therefore, during the pause in line 9, Lea, who is the non-
speaking participant, halts her activity of cutting the cake and shifts her gaze to Ann to display her recipiency and to attend to Ann’s word search activity, as shown in Figure 7.26. At the same time, Ann and Mus keep their gazes on each other during the pause in line 9.
As there is no uptake from Mus (line 9), in line 10 Ann explicitly expresses her trouble getting the word in her word search as she says “I don't kno:w (0.1)
[°ho:w,°”, and she keeps her gaze on Mus. Although Ann’s request to Mus to help
her in her word search, and also through her explicit trouble expression, Ann tries to gain Mus’ understanding as she begins to use semantic contiguity in which she provides explanation about the unknown word to her recipients (Kurhila, 2006). Thus, Ann keeps her gaze towards Mus and begins describing her word search as she says “you
know where the bro::wn”.
However, Ann’s utterance is incomplete as she pauses a moment and then shifts her gaze away from Mus to a downwards direction, clasps both of her hands, and jitters her body as she takes a quick intake of breath “>.HH<” and says “I think of it
I'm already:: ee=” (line 13 – line 14). As Ann jitters her body again and lifts both
of her shoulders upwards, it looks like she shows a feeling of repulsion as she makes and emphasises her vocal sound “ee=”, as shown in Figure 7.27.
At the same moment, Lea turns her gaze away from Ann and brings her gaze upwards, as if displaying a thinking character (Goodwin and Goodwin, 1986), as illustrated in Figure 7.27. Following Ann’s expression of repulsion through her non- vocal sound and through her body movement, Mus similarly demonstrates a feeling of repulsion feeling as she jitters her body and waves her hands close to her chest and provides a response “=>okay okay<” (line 15), which latches with Ann’s utterance, as illustrated in Figure 7.28.
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It is worth mentioning that Ann’s embodied actions of jittering her body are an enaction of her thoughts and her feeling of repulsion for the unknown insect, which co- occurs with her utterance in line 13 to line 14. Similar embodied actions are then demonstrated by Mus, who appears to show a mutual feeling of repulsion towards the unknown insect (line 15).
When Ann notices that Mus is showing an understanding, she once again
expresses her trouble to get the actual word she is searching for as she explicitly says “I
don't know how to spe:ll it” (line 18) and keeps her gaze on Mus, possibly
indicating that Mus’ co-participation is required at this moment. Even though Mus displays her understanding through her embodied actions (line 15 – line 17), she does not provide any uptake in the following 0.4 second pause in line 19. Following the silence in line 19, in taking the subsequent turn Ann is showing that she is not giving up on her word search. She shifts her gaze to Lea and makes an attempt to resolve her search through initiating spelling (line 20). As Ann spells out the third letter, her utterance overlaps with Lea’s clarification request (line 21). However, Ann does not show an uptake in the 0.5 second silence in line 22, and Lea produces a plural noun word “the:m.” (line 23) with a falling intonation followed by a fingering gesture movement, which is perhaps a reference to the insect (line 24), as illustrated in Figure 7.29. Similar to the previous example (Excerpt 16), a further solution to the word search is also demonstrated in this example, in which the search sequence is extended for further meaning negotiation for the candidate word solution produced in the search sequence.
The following paragraphs analyse the extended search sequences which show that the participants have moved to a next phase (i.e. further meaning negotiation for the candidate word solution). To ease readability the transcripts provided below are from part of the segments in Excerpt 17 (line 25 - line 51).
25 ANN: it's like ↑bro::wn (.) it's the insect (.) it lives
26 for a very lo:ng ti::me.
27 (1.5)
28 ANN: it's ve::ry di:rty.
29 (0.4)
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31 (0.9)
32 MUS: mm: ↓
((Mus makes disgusted facial gestures while both Lea and Ann gaze at her. [Fig. 7.30] ))
Figure 7.30
33 (0.6)
34 ANN: I don't know how to say it,
((Lea furrows her brows as she gazes at Mus & lifts her shoulders upwards. [Fig. 7.31] ))
Figure 7.31
35 MUS: Hahaha
36 ANN: I’m sure you kno::w but any[way
37 LEA: [ya:h
38 (0.3)
39 LEA: [>maybe<]
40 ANN: [because]of ↑tha:t animal that come(.) I got
41 really upset with insect
42 (1.8)
((Lea gulps her drink as her body posture moves upwards & downwards while sitting still. Ann makes a disgusted facial gesture. [Fig. 7.32] ))
Figure 7.32
43 ANN: that's wh:y I- I- I canno:t vi:sit fo:rest 44 MUS: ha[hahaha ha ha ]
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45 ANN: [that's my conclu:]sion 46 MUS: HAHA HAHA [haha haha 48 ANN: [ca:nnot
49 (0.2)
50 ANN: forest is the no:: 51 MUS: HAHAhahaha
Following the gestural movement demonstrated by Lea (line 24), Ann begins provides more description about her candidate solution produced earlier, something known as “exploiting the use of semantic contiguity” (Kurhila, 2006). Ann turns her gaze to Lea and produces relevant descriptive characteristics related to the word search from line 25 through line 30. She describes “krok” as “it's like ↑bro::wn”,
“it's the insect”, and “it lives for a very lo:ng ti::me” (line 25 –
line 26). Following this is an extended silence of 1.5 seconds (line 27) and Lea shows no response, indicating her non-understanding. Ann thus provides more description, saying “it's ve::ry di:rty” (line 28) and repeats the fourth characteristic with emphasis “it rea:lly dirty” (line 30). Again, Lea shows no response (0.9 seconds, line 31), and Ann then turns to gaze at Mus to check if Mus shows any understanding.
However, as Mus returns her gaze to Ann she shows uncertainty with a frowning facial expression as she responds with “mm: ↓” in a lower pitch (Figure 5.30, line 32).
Following the 0.6 second silence (line 33), both Lea and Ann exchange glances and express uncertainty through their facial expressions displaying confusion and lifting their shoulders to indicate lack of knowledge. Furthermore, as Mus and Lea shrug their shoulders their embodied actions co-occur with Ann’s explicit trouble providing the actual word for her search as she says “I don't know how to say it,” which
ends with a slight rising intonation (Figure 7.31, line 34).
Mus demonstrates token laughter (line 35) to defuse the situation, thereby mitigating her effort (Holt, 2012) to help Ann in proposing a candidate solution for the actual word in Ann’s word search. Eventually, due to their inability to figure out the name of the insect that Ann is referring to as “krok”, Ann then decides to progress with her talk and utters “I’m sure you kno::w but any[way” (line 36), and continues
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with “[because] of ↑tha:t animal that come(.) I got really upset with insect” (line 40 – line 41). At this point, Ann chooses to ‘let it pass’ (Firth, 2009) and resolves her word search through the use of the demonstrative pronoun “that” as a placeholder (Hayashi, 2003) and the use of the noun “animal” to refer to the insect that she is afraid of.
What follows is a long, 1.8 second silence (line 42) in which Lea lifts her cup to her mouth and sips her tea, moving her body posture in upward and downward motion to show repulsion, indicating her response to Ann’s utterance in line 40 to line 41 (i.e. when Ann says how the unknown insect affects her). Lea’s body movement shows that she is making her thinking process visible to her recipients (Hayashi et al., 2013), as illustrated in Figure 7.32. At the same moment, Ann makes a disgusted facial expression, also as shown in Figure 7.32.
In line 43, Ann makes a closure to her topic, and thus ends her word search sequence by uttering “that's wh:y I- I- I canno:t vi:sit fo:rest”, which she provides as her justification for the unattainable word for the insect which she refers to as “that animal”. Ann concludes her topic by expressing how she does not favour forests as a holiday destination. This is then followed by Mus’s laughter and Ann’s confirmation about visiting forest and the smiles from Lea and Ann, which indicate they have reached a mutual understanding (line 44 – line 51).
The examination in this excerpt has shown that although the actual word is not achieved in the long sequence the participants make use of multimodal resources in making sense of the word search-for in the word search practices. The embodied negotiation demonstrated by the participants in meaning-making results in a longer series of search sequences. It is notable that the embodied negotiation demonstrated by the participants through the use of semantic contiguity, embodied thinking (i.e. making thinking process visible), embodied negotiation and embodied movement in enacting the insect’s name somehow managed to build a concept to establish a sufficient
reference about the word searched-for, thus resolving their understanding in the search sequence. Thus, the references built through the use of talk and embodied actions have enabled Ann to progress in her talk, serving to achieve intersubjectivity.
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7.4 Summary
This chapter has examined word search sequences from an L2-L2 conversation over dinner, in which it is not necessary for the participants to get the actual word to resolve their word search for them to move on towards progressivity in the
conversation. It was shown that the participants organise their talk and embodied action as resources for collaborative accomplishment and achieving understanding.
Without getting the actual word, the collaborative word search resolution examined in this chapter includes the current speaker making a preference for self- completion by collaborating in talk and embodied actions as a resource in the word search activity. The examination has shown that the speakers applied creative ways to produce language forms, known as word coinage (e.g. big fry) and the use of
demonstrative pronouns such as “that” as placeholders, and also employed hand gestures, gaze and body posture as supporting devices in resolving the word search sequences.
The analyses in this chapter have also demonstrated that participants establish multimodal joint work to negotiate and co-operate to accomplish understanding in extended word search sequences. Instances in this chapter of the multimodal joint construction in resolving word search sequences without having to produce the actual word have shown that conjoined participation is significant in establishing
intersubjectivity. In doing so, the participants collaboratively construct talk and embodied actions: (1) in negotiating meaning-making; (2) as multimodal interaction strategy in meaning representation, and; (3) in building concepts as sufficient references.
It has thus been shown that getting the actual word is not necessarily required to resolve a word search. It could be argued that participants apply various methods, such as coordinating their talk and embodied actions, which show them as innovative and resourceful language users in the resolution of the word search sequence.
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