Establishing joint attention with multimodal resources in lingua franca guided tours

摘要

This paper outlines the practices by which participants achieve joint attention through multimodal resources in lingua franca guided tours. A considerable number of conversation analytic studies have examined participants' embodied maneuvers for achieving mutual attention during tours (e.g., Christidou, 2018; De Stefani, 2010; Mondada, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2019). The current study advances this line of research by expanding the scope of analysis to lingua franca guided tours. The data come from lingua franca walking tours collected in four locations: Yokohama, Antwerp, Jeju, and Taipei. Analysis revealed that the speaker resorted to multiple embodied resources to solicit other attention whether mutual attention to a focal object was guide or visitor initiated. However, one crucial difference between guides and visitors was observed in the actions employed to verbally initiate these sequences. Whereas a guide-initiated sequence began with an announcement or report, a visitor-initiated sequence was launched with a question. Additionally, it was shown that, at least during achievement of joint attention, the tour being a "lingua franca" tour was not of such significant relevance as to cause difficulties for the participants even in the face of non-standard language use as they seamlessly achieved intersubjectivity through deployment of multi-layered embodied resources.