Hofstetter, Keevallik, Kerrison, Löfgren, Pelikan & Wiggins presented at OFTI, Uppsala, Sept. 21-22, 2023.
Responses to response cries
Goffman’s (1978) seminal work on response cries showed the social order inherent in the sounds often thought to be chaotic. While Goffman claimed that RCs produce “no dialog”, studies of recorded interaction show that RCs are regularly surrounded by organizational work from co-participants, including drawing gaze (see Goodwin & Goodwin 1996), inviting aid (Keevallik 2023), and inviting aligning responses (Pehkonen 2020). Co-participants typically also need access to the multimodal event that triggered the RC, in order to make sense of the sound itself, meaning that RCs have bodily-syntactic (Keevallik 2018) organization. In this paper we aim to expand Pehkonen’s work by examining how responses specify and repair RCs in Swedish, English, and Estonian. We focus on non-lexical vocalizations, a subset of RCs that includes only semi- or non-conventional ‘liminal sounds’ (see Dingemanse 2020; Keevallik & Ogden 2020). Using several corpora of video interactions, including sporting events, physical exercise, family mealtimes, opera rehearsals, gaming, dancing, and robot interaction (over 300 hours), we examine the actions of co-participants during and after (non-lexical) RCs. We argue that these sounds are predominantly treated as assessments, with participants specifying evaluative stances towards the event. When the sounds are not transparent as to stance or relevance, they are repaired, and repair can be self- or other-initiated. We particularly aim to expand on post-RC specifications, from both self and others, and to examine whether they are treated as responsive or as components in the RC action package. RCs are systematically organized in multiparty, turn-taking participation frameworks, and our work will demonstrate that the so-called ‘flooding out’ of inner states (Goffman 1978) is a distributed interconnection between multiple participants’ words, syntax, sounds, and bodies.
Non-lexical vocalizations 