A multimodal analysis of assessment sequences in Chilean Spanish interaction

This thesis presents a study of food assessments in Chilean Spanish interaction. The data consists of video recordings of six pairs of Chilean participants sampling British foods unknown to them. They tried each food at the same time and discussed their opinions. They were asked to do a joint ranking of these products to elicit sequences of agreement and disagreement. The data is analysed combining the methods of conversation analysis with those of interactional linguistics and the study of embodied interaction. There are three analytic chapters. The first one explores what constitutes a canonical assessment, i.e. aspects of the turn design of assessments in the particular context of the data and how they compare to the literature in English. The second analytic chapter is about the lead-up to an assessment. I explore how speakers initiate assessments (with particular attention to the role of eye gaze). The third analytic chapter deals with how non-lexical (and other) tokens and the co-occurring embodied aspects of their production (prosodic features, gestures, etc.) are designed and understood as projecting a stance towards the food. All things considered, this thesis contributes to filling a knowledge gap in relation to the study of assessments in the Spanish language. It also contributes the novelty of studying food assessments among non-experts. Finally, this thesis sheds light on how assessments arise in interaction and about the emergence of linguistic organisation through other non-verbal activities

Non-convergent boundaries and action ascription in multimodal interaction

Without units, there are no boundaries; and without boundaries there are no units. Traditional linguistics takes units such as sentences and intonation phrases for granted, and treats them as static. Interactional Linguistics has reconfigured many of these units, treating them as emergent, focusing on their evolution in time, and how they implement social actions. One of the productive lines of research of interactional linguistics has been this tension between conventional linguistic units, and units of (and for) interaction (Szczepek Reed and Raymond 2013; Ogden and Walker 2013). The cesura approach (Barth-Weingarten 2016) focuses on the constitution of phonetic-prosodic discontinuities which give rise to boundaries, ‘cesuras’, which it treats as a continuum from ‘no cesura’ through ‘candidate cesuras’ of various strengths, to ‘full cesuras’. However, there are also elements of spoken interaction whose unit-hood is not obvious at all levels of description; and it is a subset of these that forms the focus of this paper. We illustrate with extracts of multimodal talk where two interactants taste and then move to assess unfamiliar food, and produce the token ‘mm’. We show how the alignment (and non-alignment) of boundaries of sequential, prosodic, gestural, lexical, and syntactic units can be a semiotic resource. Data is from Chilean Spanish