Delaying moving away: Place, mobility, and the multimodal organization of activities

Abstract

In mobile activities alternating between staying at a place and walking to the next place, such as guided visits, the initiation of walking awayis a powerful practice to achieve closing of conversational sequences and courses of action. This was demonstrated in a previous paper (Broth & Mondada, 2013): in this follow-up paper, we elaborate on the options that can be responsive to walking away, by focusing on actions that co-participants make in order to momentarily stopit, occasioning a delayed departure/closing. Delying walking awaymay be done, accountably, either as a continuation of the previous course of action, or as an initiation of a new course of action related to the present local position of the participants. The study is based on a large corpus of visits to different places and for diverse purposes, in French, Swedish and English. It also shows how trajectories of walking, their projections and their obstacles, are exemplary embodied practices revealing fundamental features of sequential organization – crucially related to the progressivity of talk, actions, and activities.