Multimodal and collaborative practices in the organization of word searches in lingua franca military meetings

Highlights

• Word searches emerge as discrete activities in meeting talk, and they can be solitarily or collaboratively resolved.

• Co-participation in word searches is enabled or limited by turn design.

• Embodied contextualization of searched-for items is important.

• Embodied resources are key in achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing co-participant entries.

• Unsolicited collaborative searches make the negotiation of epistemic authority relevant.

Abstract

This study investigates word finding difficulties in military meetings during a crisis management exercise in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). Multimodal conversation analysis (CA) is used to examine how searching for a next item in a turn-in-progress, i.e., a word search, is attended to via coordination of verbal and embodied conduct. The analysis shows different kinds of word search organizations: searches can be initiated and carried out without recruiting the co-participants’ assistance, co-participation can be invited to varying degrees, and searches can be collaboratively completed without the speaker's visible attempts to solicit assistance. These organizations are illustrative of the institutional and interactional context, namely that the opportunities to invite and manage co-participation via verbal and bodily-visual resources, such as gaze and indexing or iconic gestures, are in some cases more limited than in others. These opportunities are foremost connected to the sequential and sociomaterial environment of word searches and the situated roles enacted by the participants. The study highlights word searches as discrete activities that make linguistic and epistemic discrepancies between the speaker and co-participants relevant and negotiable in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction.