The dynamics of embodied participation and language choice in multilingual meetings

Abstract

AbstractThis article deals with the organization of multilingual meetings, considering the interplay of multimodal resources constituting their interactional order. Using Conversation Analysis, it explores the mobilization of multimodal and multilingual resources by the participants in order to make possible, sustain, and change participation within a meeting. Moreover, it focuses on language choice as a situated and embodied achievement.The article's empirical contribution is a detailed analysis of a single case, an episode within a meeting in which several radical changes occur concerning language, participation, interactional space, and the categorization of the participants. The analysis explores the systematic organizational features characterizing the meeting before and after change, showing the embodied practices enabling a participant who was silent, sitting in the last row of the room, not speaking the language of the meeting, to become a recognized expert, thus changing the language of the meeting and reorganizing the opportunities to participate. (Conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, meetings, multilingualism, participation, multimodality, language choice, categorization, identity)*