Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction—Theoretical and Methodological Issues

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Embodied Activities

      • Cornelia Gerhardt, Elisabeth Reber

      Pages 3-27

   3. Activities as Discrete Organizational Domains

      • Harrie Mazeland

      Pages 29-61

   4. Practices for Showing, Looking, and Videorecording: The Interactional Establishment of a Common Focus of Attention

      • Lorenza Mondada

      Pages 63-104

3. Objects in Space

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 105-105

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   2. Inspecting Objects: Visibility Manoeuvres in Laparoscopic Surgery

      • Jeff Bezemer, Ged Murtagh, Alexandra Cope

      Pages 107-135

   3. ‘Showing’ as a Means of Engaging a Reluctant Participant into a Joint Activity

      • Cornelia Gerhardt

      Pages 137-175

   4. Joint Attention in Passing: What Dual Mobile Eye Tracking Reveals About Gaze in Coordinating Embodied Activities at a Market

      • Anja Stukenbrock, Anh Nhi Dao

      Pages 177-213

4. Complex Participation Frameworks

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 215-215

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   2. Multiparty Coordination Under Time Pressure: The Social Organization of Handball Team Time-Out Activities

      • Christian Meyer, Ulrich v. Wedelstaedt

      Pages 217-253

   3. ‘Punch and Judy’ Politics? Embodying Challenging Courses of Action in Parliament

      • Elisabeth Reber

      Pages 255-297

   4. Assessments in Transition: Coordinating Participation Framework Transitions in Institutional Settings

      • Darren Reed

      Pages 299-326

5. Affiliation and Alignment

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 327-327

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   2. Embodying Empathy in Everyday and Institutional Settings: On the Negotiation of Resources, Rights, and Responsibilities in Comforting Actions

      • Maxi Kupetz

      Pages 329-367

   3. Negotiating Activity Closings with Reciprocal Head Nods in Mandarin Conversation

      • Xiaoting Li

      Pages 369-396

   4. Position Expansion in Meeting Talk: An Interaction-Re-organizing Type of and-Prefaced Other-Continuation

      • Harrie Mazeland

      Pages 397-433

6. Epilogue

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 435-435

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   2. Epilogue

      • Cornelia Gerhardt, Elisabeth Reber

      Pages 437-452

7. Back Matter

   Pages 453-459

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This edited book revisits the concept of social ‘activities’ from an interactional perspective, examining how verbal, vocal, visual-spatial and material resources are deployed by participants for meaning-making in social encounters. The eleven original chapters within this volume analyse activities based on video recordings of naturalistic and naturally occurring social encounters from face-to-face and mediated settings in Chinese, Dutch, English, French, and German. Informed primarily by the methodological approaches of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, the authors study embodiment in space and time in three distinct types of situations: objects in space, complex participation frameworks, and affiliation and alignment. Moreover, the book includes a theoretical and methodological discussion of how activities are constituted and visibly embodied in interaction. It will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology and linguistics in general, and face-to-face and mediated interaction in particular.

• interactional linguistics
• multimodality
• Conversation Analysis
• embodied interaction
• anthropology
• gesture
• social interaction
• Social Semiotics
• Activity theory
• mediated interaction
• health communication
• gaze behaviour
• face-to-face activities
• adversarial interactions
• Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs)
• institutional interaction
• discourse analysis

“The contributions in the book are easy to read, which makes the book accessible for doctoral researchers or students of linguistics or sociology who are interested in interactional research. … the volume is suitable for senior scholars generally interested in human interaction; it serves as a great handbook of social activities in the fields of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. Finally, the contributions in the volume are of high quality and worth reading in their own right.” (Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 156, 2020)

• Institute of New Philologies, Modern Languages, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

  Elisabeth Reber

• Department of English, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

  Cornelia Gerhardt

Elisabeth Reber is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Würzburg, Germany. She is co-convener of the DFG-funded scientific network “Multimodality and Embodied Interaction” (with Cornelia Gerhardt) and author of the monograph Affectivity in Interaction: Sound Objects in English (2012).


Cornelia Gerhardt is lecturer in English Linguistics at Saarland University, Germany. Her research interests include the interactional appropriation of media and the embodiment of language at the interface with social phenomena such as football and food. Her previous books include Appropriating Live Televised Football through Talk (2014) and Culinary Linguistics (2013).

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