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The dynamics of embodied participation and language choice in multilingual meetings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2012

Lorenza Mondada
Lorenza Mondada
Affiliation:
ICAR research lab, ENS Lyon, BP 7000, F-69342 Lyon, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article deals with the organization of multilingual meetings, considering the interplay of multimodal resources constituting their interactional order. Using Conversation Analysis, it explores the mobilization of multimodal and multilingual resources by the participants in order to make possible, sustain, and change participation within a meeting. Moreover, it focuses on language choice as a situated and embodied achievement.

The article's empirical contribution is a detailed analysis of a single case, an episode within a meeting in which several radical changes occur concerning language, participation, interactional space, and the categorization of the participants. The analysis explores the systematic organizational features characterizing the meeting before and after change, showing the embodied practices enabling a participant who was silent, sitting in the last row of the room, not speaking the language of the meeting, to become a recognized expert, thus changing the language of the meeting and reorganizing the opportunities to participate. (Conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, meetings, multilingualism, participation, multimodality, language choice, categorization, identity)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 213 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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