Establishing joint imagined spaces in game explanations

Abstract

This study builds on the observation that establishing joint imagined space is an integral part of a wide range of discursive practices, e.g. telling a story or discussing architectonic problems. Conceptualizing imagination as a co-operative and interactively organized activity that involves the participants’ embodied co-orientation to absent entities, we examine in detail how an imagined space of a game board is created in the activity of explaining a game. The analysis is based on video recordings of children with varying capabilities as they engage in game explanations with an adult. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis and Bühler’s theory of deixis, we examine how two children come to terms with the epistemic and perceptual tasks involved in establishing joint imagined spaces. Findings demonstrate that both children demonstrate considerable skills in dealing with the perceptual task, i.e. mobilizing and monitoring the addressee’s visual co-orientation. They differ, however, in how they attend to the epistemic task, i.e. take into account differential states of knowledge and reorganize the indexical ground.