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Pragmatics: Online-First Articles

Embodied interaction with face masks and social distancing

Brazilian health care workers’ daily routines in pandemic times

ORCID logo | Federal University of Minas Gerais
| Federal Institute of Minas Gerais
In this article, we ask how interlocutors proceed with their daily activities in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic when faced with new ways of communication due to social distancing and the use of face masks. We carried out a fine-grained analysis of different micropractices from daily work in a healthcare center in Brazil and built our analysis on multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), interactional linguistics (IC), as well as gesture studies (GS). The analysis revealed that particularly the following recurrent patterns seem to be characteristic for communication during the pandemic in the given microcontexts: (a) a high use of deictic gestures, (b) an intensification of prosodic means, (c) verbal strategies such as reformulation and repetition, (d) the integration of object manipulation and (e) mitigation strategies in case of new formats that imply intrusion such as controls at travel checkpoints.
Keywords: interactional linguistics, multimodal conversation analysis, deictic gestures, healthcare workers, pandemic, intonation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.From ‘face-to-face’ interaction to new forms of talk in pandemic times
    • 2.1Embodiment in ‘face-to-face’ interaction
    • 2.2Interactional practices in pandemic times
  • 3.Methodological procedure and hindrances
  • 4.Analysis of Brazilian health care workers’ daily routines during the pandemic
    • 4.1Emergent interaction patterns at a Covid-19 travel checkpoint
    • 4.2Making an appointment at a local healthcare center
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23021.sch
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