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Part of
Media as Procedures of Communication
Edited by Martin Luginbühl and Jan Georg Schneider
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 348] 2024
► pp. 188–217

Chapter 8
The choreography of multimedial procedures and multimodal languaging in French family dinners

| Sorbonne Nouvelle University
In this paper we present a multimodal multimedial approach to multiparty interactions through the analysis of French family dinners in which child and adult participants are engaged in the activities of eating and interacting. The term multimodality is used to refer to the variety of semiotic resources (gesture, speech, facial expressions, gaze) engaged in languaging (Linell 2009), and multimediality to refer to the media used in context to construct meaning (such as communicative manipulative actions/languaging). Our aim is to capture the multiple deployments of the embodied behaviors of dinner participants, and children’s progressive socialization to multiactivity. We show how family members collaboratively manage the accomplishments of multiple streams of activity and coordinate their temporal organizations through the embodied performances of eating and interacting (Goodwin 1984). The families consist of two adults and one to three children. We illustrate how children are progressively socialized to the art of dining which involves food consumption and conversation. They learn to deploy multimedial procedures in a multitude of skillful variations in the collective coordination of bodies, activities and artifacts.
Keywords: multimedial procedures, multimodality, languaging, inter-languaging, language socialization, French family dinners, multiparty interactions, communicative actions, co-activity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.State of the art and theoretical framework
    • 2.1Language development, language socialization and family dinners
    • 2.2From language development to the development of specialized multimodal practices
    • 2.3A new theoretical framework: Thinking for languaging
  • 3.Method and data
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Ethical review
    • 3.3Method
  • 4.Qualitative analyses
    • 4.1Orchestrating activities and modalities at the dinner table
    • 4.2Articulating object manipulation, eating and languaging
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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