The Multimodal and Sequential Design of Co-Animation as a Practice for Association in English Interaction

This thesis describes the understudied interactional practice of co-animation: during the development of an activity in conversation, a speaker incorporates an animation -i.e. a quote, or (re)enactment - and a co-participant responds, pre-emptively, or in the contiguous turn, with a completion or continuation of the animation of the same figure. Based on the study of 89 co-animation sequences found in 10 hours of video-recordings of naturalistic English interaction between friends, relatives or co-workers, this thesis adopts the theoretical and methodological tenets of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics to describe the multimodal, sequential, and relational organisation of this practice. This thesis analyses how participants mark the shift from the here-and-now into the animation space, and how co-participants make their contributions both hearable as coherent with prior animations, and as fitted affiliative responses that further the ongoing course of action. Lexico-grammatical, phonetic, and gestural-postural resources are analysed for their interactional import in their concurrent framing of animation and the display of stance and conditional relevance. The organisation of resources in responsive co-animations is found to be positionally-sensitive, with co-participants negotiating agency and epistemic access and entitlement differently relative to the onset of co-animation and to the stage in the ongoing activity. The scrutiny of the situated deployment of co-animation in the social activities of troubles-tellings/complaint stories on the one hand, and teasing/joint fictionalisation on the other, reveals how co-animation contributes to the process of association, that is, the building of single momentary units of participation (collectivities). Co-participants are found to team up around what is presented as a shared stance, values, and identity, against absent but invoked behaviours or individuals engaging in moral transgressions, by jointly “doing being” the same voice

Social Psychology in Action

The above maxim is often attributed to psychologist Kurt Lewin. Shortly after his death in 1947, the psychological historian E. C. Tolman wrote of Lewin: “Freud the clinician and Lewin the experimentalist – these are the two men whose names will stand out before all others in the history of our psychological era” (Marrow, 1969). Although Freud has become a household name, Lewin’s ideas and work are mostly unknown to the general public. Among psychologists, however, Kurt Lewin is well known as one of the founders of modern experimental social psychology and recognized for his early contributions in applying psychological science to real human society. His interest in the social uses of psychological research is evident not only from his work on “group dynamics”—a term he coined, involving, for example, research on leadership, communication, and group performance— but also from the applied research institutes he established, such as the Committee on Community Interrelations (McCain, 2015). Indeed, for Lewin, research served a double purpose: “to seek deeper explanations of why people behave the way they do and to discover how they may learn to behave better” (Marrow, 1969, p. xi; Italics added). Science was, in other words, a way to discover general laws of human functioning as well as a way to solve practical problems, a combination Lewin labeled “action research.” To achieve this goal, Lewin proposed, there is nothing as practical as a good theory—a maxim Lewin himself attributed to “a business man” he once met (Lewin, 1943)