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Project

Dog walk encounters: Openings between unacquainted persons walking their dog in public place

As part of the SNF/FWO project The first five words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space, directed by Prof. Lorenza Mondada and Prof. Elwys De Stefani, my thesis studies chance encounters of unacquainted people walking their dogs in public space. I am interested in the openings of these encounters, which can be very diverse: some are just “fleeting moments of co-presence” (Ryave & Schenkein 1974:273), whereas others lead to the progressive establishment of common interactional space (Mondada 2009). On the basis of video data of naturally occurring interactions, I aim to explore how exactly these transient and mobile encounters emerge, what practices and resources are mobilized by the participants moment-by-moment and, not least, the interactional role of dogs as active participants.

Existing literature on openings takes into account the preparatory activities that may precede the mutually recognizable entry into the encounter, notably Schegloff’s (1979) notion of “pre-beginning,” or Mondada’s (2010) notion of “pre-opening”. In a mobile setting like dog walking, displaying mutual perception and approaching each other are fundamental aspects of the pre-beginning, as implemented in the parties’ mobile trajectories. Accordingly, the emergence of an encounter is gradual, in which participants are in a process of finding a common temporality, oscillating between engagement and disengagement.

An important aspect of my work will be the fine-grained analysis of the parties’ constant bodily “reflexive micro-sequential adjustments” as they approach each other, based on the sequential relationship of ‘prior’ and ‘next’, and organized through “multiple temporal simultaneities” (Mondada 2021). The presence of dogs complexifies the situation at hand but, at the same time, reveals certain preparatory practices of the participants. I will investigate the dog’s actions as being relevant and consequential for the actions of the guardians (Mondémé 2013; 2016). Based on Goodwin & Goodwin (2004), who conceptualize “participation as action”, i.e., as an interactional achievement, I consider the dogs as potential participants, hence to be fully included in the sequential analysis of the encounter.

Using multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this thesis aims (1) to contribute to the analysis of openings of mobile face-to-face encounters by systematically taking into account the individuals’ embodied resources on a micro-sequential level; (2) to show the relevance of public space for pro-social ways of living, as well as the interactional and practical challenges participants face during dog-walking and how they overcome them by displaying an emergent, shared understanding of the praxeological context; (3) to explore new methods for video recording in natural public settings of interaction.

Date:28 Sep 2020 →  Today
Keywords:Conversation Analysis, Interactional Space, Multimodality, Interactional Linguistics
Disciplines:Language studies not elsewhere classified, Applied sociology not elsewhere classified
Project type:PhD project