Turn-Taking for Turntaking: Mobility, Time, and Action in the Sequential Organization of Junction Negotiations in Cars

Abstract

This article draws on audio-video data of people driving in cars and on methods used in multimodal interaction analysis and conversation analysis to study how people negotiate where to turn at the next junction. The analyzed activity is called negotiating the next junction. The article describes the participants' talk and embodied actions that are produced for this activity and the impact that mobility and a moving environment have on how it is achieved as a situated practice of driving. First, this article shows that the activity is sequentially organized into 3 verbally produced parts. However, second, despite the apparent verbal element of the sequence, drivers and passengers display through the design of their actions that they orient to various features of the mobile context as relevant to the production of the junction-negotiation activity. This article specifically focuses on how participants can be seen to orient to the physical shape of the junction and movement through the environment (e.g., movement toward the junction and the turn at the junction). The analysis shows that interlocutors' actions are reflexively connected to the moving semiotic environment, and that talk and the features of the mobile environment are conflated and sequentially organized relative to each other. Finally, the article supplements prior interactional research by showing that compared to static social situations, participants design and temporally adjust their actions by quickly modifying them relative to the mobile situation. This shows that drivers and passengers together orient to the criticalness of the correct timing of actions in a mobile environment in cars.