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Part of
New Perspectives in Interactional Linguistic Research
Edited by Margret Selting and Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 36] 2024
► pp. 278–309

Requesting in shop encounters

Multimodal gestalts and their interactional and institutional accountability

| University of Basel
The chapter offers a systematic study of requests in shop encounters. Considering their detailed formats, constituted through the specific assembling of diverse resources including speakers’ turn, gaze, gestures, and body postures that I call multimodal Gestalts, it identifies different types of requests and their sequential implicativeness. The chapter shows how these multimodal formats are methodically bound to the categorization of speakers/customers, their epistemic and sensorial relations to the product, and as a consequence, to the response of the seller, the service they offer, and the progressivity of the encounter. In this sense, multimodal Gestalts are crucial for understanding the systematic accountability of the action and its sequential organization, as well as the social-institutional features of the situated activity in which this action is embedded. The study contributes to IL research by demonstrating how linguistic and embodied resources are deeply and systematically intertwined, and showing the necessity to go beyond talk for understanding the variation and indexicality of social actions.
Keywords: requests, multimodality, multimodal Gestalt, shop encounter, gaze, pointing gesture, body posture, reference, materiality, multisensoriality, video-recorded data in French, English, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art: The multimodal formatting of requests
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Simplest requests: Naming the product
    • 4.1Requesting by naming the product
    • 4.2Requesting by naming and quickly glancing/pointing to the product
  • 5.Requesting by naming the product while bodily orienting to it
    • 5.1Checking (on) the requested product
    • 5.2Searching for a product to request
  • 6.Requests and multimodal epistemic stances: The consequentiality of displaying (not) knowing
    • 6.1Requesting the product with its name vs. deictic expressions
    • 6.2Requests naming the product while looking at it, followed by a check of knowledge
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
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