Abstract
When customers bring a material item to a shop for repair, they must make the item and its troubles inspectable to the staff at the shop. This typically requires physical manipulation of the object by the customer. For their part, the staff person may then need to take the item into their own hands to further inspect it. A physical transfer of the object from customer to staff person may thus need to be accomplished. A practical problem that can arise in such transfers is this: who has the rights and responsibilities to touch and hold the object at any given time? In our data from a shoe repair shop, this practical problem is one of turn-taking of the participants’ hands, and the participants exhibit a clear normative orientation to “one person touches at a time”, with gaps and overlaps being common but brief. The parallels to verbal turn-taking are explored, as are the different affordances of each semiotic resource. The data are in American English.
Highlights
Many of our mundane everyday actions involve the transfer of a physical object from one person to the other, whether this be for the purpose of handing over a cup of coffee at the breakfast table, a set of car keys before setting out on a drive, money or a credit card when paying for a service or good at a shop, the remote control for the television, etc
The specific context we are exploring for this is that of a North American shoe repair shop, in which customers regularly hand over items that need repairing to the staff
Though the interplay between language, the body and material objects has received some attention in recent conversation analytic literature on different commercial and professional settings (e.g. the edited volumes by Nevile et al (2014), Day and Wagner (2019), Fox et al, as well as individual papers such as Streeck, 1996, Llewellyn, 2011, Heath, 2012, Mondada, 2019), studies that focus explicitly on how material objects are transferred between participants in interaction have only recently begun to receive attention
Summary
Many of our mundane everyday actions involve the transfer of a physical object from one person to the other, whether this be for the purpose of handing over a cup of coffee at the breakfast table, a set of car keys before setting out on a drive, money or a credit card when paying for a service or good at a shop, the remote control for the television, etc. We will show that the manual transfer of an object in the shoe repair shop is coordinated to begin as the customer is coming to the end of their verbal request, syntactically, prosodically and pragmatically (Ford and Thompson, 1996); in other words, the embodied work of transferring the object from customer to staff is oriented to as due at what Sacks et al (1974) termed a Transition Relevance Place (TRP), projected by the customer’s formulation of their service request. This and the issue of affordances are discussed in more detail throughout the paper and in particular in our discussion
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