Speakership, recipiency and the interactional space: Cases of “Next-speaker self-selects” in multiparty university student meetings

Abstract

This paper addresses the pragmatics of meeting interactions by focusing on a locally managed turn-taking system in a recurring meeting activity that is yet to be examined, namely, roundtable update discussion. In these activities, a meeting chair appoints primary speakership to each participant to give an update on recent work, during which non-chair, non-primary co-participants may contribute ideas and raise questions. By examining a collection of four cases of one specific turn-taking practicev, namely, next speaker self-selection, this study illustrates: 1) how the static, seated interactional space affords a non-chair, non-primary participant various multimodal resources in pursuing and constructing his/her self-selecting actions, and 2) how co-participants mobilise the multimodal resources that are made available by the physical seating arrangements in the local ecologies of the activity, to carry out mutual monitoring and orientation in accordance with their emerging roles. Particularly, this study explores the systematicity of participants’ mobilisation of multimodal resources by revealing the hierarchical order of gaze/head movements, upper torso and gesture when deployed in side-by-side and face-to-face seating arrangements. Such an explication shed new lights on how visual access in-between incipient self-selecting speakers and current speakers is exploited as a publicly-available resource to contextualise the operation of turn-taking.