Grounding lists
Building common ground as a multimodal practice in interaction
Drawing on findings from three distinct corpora encompassing interactions in Spanish, Portuguese, and German, this
study investigates the role of lists as strategic devices employed by interlocutors in everyday storytellings and positioning
activities to establish common ground (CG). Termed ‘grounding lists’, our research identifies them as a distinct communicative
practice for dynamically co-building CG. We found three domains to be most relevant in our data: (a) Personal CG emerging from
biographically shared experiences, (b) Communal CG emerging from shared cultural knowledge, and (c) Communal CG emerging from
shared everyday knowledge. Our findings reveal the primary characteristics of grounding lists being stylized prosody, reduced
itemization, general extenders, lexical elements or quotatives in the onset projecting generalizability, early affiliation,
reported speech, as well as gestural depiction. Through empirical analysis, we demonstrate the extent to which each type of CG
aligns with these identified features of grounding lists and highlight that it is particularly the dominant use of the list as an
abstract gestalt, less as a sedimented practice in itself, that defines grounding lists. This kind of list is strongly marked by
its gestalt projection, enabling intersubjectivity and co-building of CG through animated speech and gestural enactment.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.State of the art
- 2.1Lists in interaction
- 2.2From common ground to lists
- 3.Methodological procedure
- 4.Analysis
- 4.1CG emerging from biographically or immediate shared experiences
- 4.1.1Sequence “Pensar em português”
- 4.1.2Sequence “Aquí al lado”
- 4.1.3Sequence “Paseo”
- 4.2CG emerging from shared cultural knowledge
- 4.2.1Sequence “Ey Du”
- 4.2.2Sequence “Con mi familia”
- 4.3CG emerging from shared everyday knowledge
- 4.3.1Sequence “Gafitas”
- 4.3.2Sequence “Grupo”
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
- Symbols used in transcripts
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Bibliography