The data that I will bring to the workshop come from a video recording of a group of four university students in a group discussion in an English as a foreign language classroom. During the discussion, the students orient to their responsibility to give and discuss their opinions in English. They also orient to the responsibility of each participant to take the role of opinion-giver, which involves not only stating his or her opinion, but also responding to questions or requests for elaboration regarding his or her opinion. What is of especial interest is the work involved in negotiating a change in the role of opinion-giver, which includes negotiation over whether current opinion-giver may move out of this role and negotiation over who should next enter this role. This negotiation is accomplished through both verbal and non-verbal cues, including gestures and physical movement.
What I call a "surrogate body" is a recurrently observable phenomenon. It refers to that kind of gesture whose meaning is organized through its juxtaposition with talk and the structure of the body that the gesture is performed on. The meaning of the gesture and the very structure that that meaning of the gesture relies on elaborate each other. It is a kind of what Chuck Goodwin calls a "symbiotic gesture" (the kind of gesture whose meaning is accomplished in the conjuncture of the gesture, talk and the structure of the environment"), but a reflexive one, so to speak, in that body movements structure themselves through each other's conjuncture. A "surrogate body" is not a peculiar phenomenon; it is very common. I present a couple of instances for it and raises some questions about it, attempting to see in which direction the phenomenon will lead us.