Kerrison presented at NORDISCO23 in Tampere on “Practices of initiation in sports cheering”.
Abstract:
Instances of incipient talk have traditionally been defined as interactions where participants treat long silences as non-final and unproblematic “adjournments” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973) of response relevance. This was originally understood in relation to speech but multimodal interaction research has been expanding this view. The consideration has since turned to how mutual orientation to side-activities such as driving or watching television may excuse or even require these lapses in speech (Hoey, 2015; Keevallik, 2018). This presentation continues the exploration of incipient talk in multi-activity settings by investigating how sports audiences restart collective cheering after lapses. Cheering is a particular form of collective talk involving structures like chanting and call-and-response routines that audiences use to layer multiple individual performances into one shared performance that is loud enough to be heard throughout an arena (Kerrison, 2018). This increased interactive reach is then used to do work in support of the team such as providing encouragement or distracting opponents. Cheering is not typically continuous and there may be lapses of several minutes where supporters focus on watching the game
or shouting individual comments. Video recordings are presented of student ice hockey fans during games at a university in the northeastern United States. The analysis focuses on moments where the participants transition from watching to cheering and examines what multimodal resources are used to accomplish these collective shifts in activity. This provides a deeper understanding of cheering as a collaborative undertaking and addresses lapses as a phenomenon in collective performances as well as individual turn-taking.
Non-lexical vocalizations 