Abstract
Car conversations constitute a perspicuous setting, characterized by multiactivity (i.e., by an engagement in multiple simultaneous activities, as talking and driving). Based on a corpus of videorecordings of various naturally occurring car journeys, the paper focuses on the way in which participants coordinate their multiactivity in either convergent or divergent ways. It shows how they mobilize various embodied multimodal resources, such as talk, gesture, gaze, head movements, and body postures in order to display their current engagement in one or more activities, in a way highly sensitive to the sequential organization of talk.
About the author
Lorenza Mondada (b. 1963) is professor for linguistics at the University of Basel (lorenza.mondada@unibas.ch). Her research interests concern conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, workplace studies, and the study of multimodality. Her publications include the co-edition, with A. Lindström, of the special issue on Assessments in Social Interaction, Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42 : 4, 2009; with T. Stivers and J. Steensig, of Knowledge and Morality in Conversation. Rights, Responsibilities and Accountability. Cambridge University Press, 2011; with P. Haddington and M. Nevile of Interaction and mobility: language and the body in motion. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. She has also widely published in journals like Journal of Pragmatics, Language in Society, Discourse Studies, Research on Language and Social Interaction.
©[2012] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
