Article published in:
Interacting with Objects: Language, materiality, and social activity
Edited by Maurice Nevile, Pentti Haddington, Trine Heinemann and Mirka Rauniomaa
[Not in series 186] 2014
► pp. 101–124

Objects as tools for talk

| University of Southern Denmark
| University of Southern Denmark
This paper deals with the touching, grasping, moving and handling of relatively small physical objects within spates of talk-in-interaction. We are interested in the organisation of such actions and the distribution of the objects amongst interactants in their unfolding activities, specifically in relation to how nteractants, analogously, organise and distribute their turns at talk. Unlike previous work, we attend less to objects as referred-to objects or as components of topic development. Instead, our focus is on objects as transactional in the ways in which they support fundamental infrastructure of interaction, namely that turns at talk and objects are taken or possessed in some sense and this is signalled and collaboratively organised by participants.
Published online: 12 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.186.05day
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