Embodied departure from focal objects in a lingua franca campus tour

Abstract

Abstract This conversation analytic study examines the interaction coordinated between two amateur tour guides and a guided visitor for initiating departure from various objects during a campus tour managed through Japanese as a lingua franca. The data come from a 40-minute tour at a Taiwanese university in which two Taiwanese students acted as guides for one American professor. The resulting analysis revealed the guided visitor’s active role in determining departure from focal objects through deployment of assessments and bodily movements. This study supports findings from previous research on various languages by providing empirical evidence that the following two phenomena are highly consistent across languages and that they hold true even in lingua franca interaction: (1) assessments are routinely deployed to close a sequence; and (2) assessments are made recognizable as initiating closings when they act in concert with sequential positioning, bodily movements, the environmental context, and objects in the immediate surround.