Joint turn construction through language and the body: Notes on embodiment in coordinated participation in situated activities

Abstract This article explores how participants in Japanese conversation use language and the body as resources for jointly constructing turns at talk during ‘description activities’. I examine how language and participants’ bodily conduct mutually contextualize one another to build temporally-unfolding frameworks of co-participation, and explore ways in which participants utilize such frameworks as resources to accomplish joint turn construction. By examining intricate processes of joint turn construction achieved through the use of language and embodied actions, I argue that, while turns-at-talk are often treated as if they were a bounded slot for speaking given to one participant at a time, they may be more adequately conceptualized as a temporally unfolding, interactively sustained domain of multimodal conduct through which both the speaker and recipients build in concert with one another relevant actions that contribute to the further progression of the activity in progress.

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