March 20, 2011

The 63rd Meeting of Mind and Activity



Saturday, March 26, 2011

3:30PM - 6:30PM
Main Building (Building #1), the 5th floor
Room 1555
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo

Program

We are having two data sessions and, perhaps, one small presentation.

3:30 PM Satomi Kuroshima,
Practice for selecting a next speaker in ordering sushi: Multimodal resources and participation of action initiation

When we initiate a social action, the recipient is naturally selected as a next speaker. In order to ensure the next speaker selection, parties of talk construct a framework for participation. This paper examines how customers at a sushi restaurant construct such a framework through multimodal resources, i.e., bodies, gaze, and talk, to initiate the action of request for food. The detail analysis of moment-by-moment interaction will show two cases for selecting a recipient (i.e., initiating the action): (a) when customers request for the recipient’s gaze (explicit selection), and (b) when they do not (tacit selection). In occasions where there could be other participants who could be doing the same action, they use their bodies (i.e., upper body movement) or summons to request for the recipient's mutual looking as a prior to the main activity. If they know that the recipient is already looking at the customers at the time of ordering (i.e., it is recognizable for the recipient who the ordering party is), they can initiate an action without being engaged in this prior activity. Furthermore, on an occasion when there is no competing participant, the customer can also initiate a request action without requesting even without the chef's gaze. Hence, it will argue that it is critical for the speakers on initiating an ordering action how they are recognizable by the chef as an ordering party.

5:00 PM Data Session: Data is provided by Domenic Berducci

I can show some 'spit-up' sequences. My concern will be about 'social order' this time initiated by infants (last time order was initiated by caregivers when they 'acted-on' the infants. Now with spit-up the caregivers have to deal with a contingency, and they do so in an orderly/predictable manner.





If anybody is interested in bringing their own data, analyses, observations, arguments, or whatever, to a next meeting to discuss together, please contact Aug Nishizaka at augnish(a)soc.meijigakuin.ac.jp.