Embodied Coparticipation Practices in Collaborative Storytelling

This conversation-analytic paper investigates embodied practices through which participants organize coparticipation in collaborative storytellings. The data for the multimodal analysis is drawn from a corpus of video recorded French and Spanish conversations. We analyze two distinct teller-initiated forms of coparticipation, i.e., word searches and requests for verification, and three co-teller-initiated forms of coparticipation, i.e., adding omitted elements, affiliative other-corrections, and rendering one’s own side. We find that current tellers deploy specific turn-constructional as well as embodied resources, such as gaze, gesture, and body posture, in order to solicit conditional co-teller entry and to forward the overall progressivity of the telling sequence. When co-tellers enter the telling-in-progress, they design their actions within specific embodied participation frameworks that make recognizable the extent of their entry and how their coparticipation shall be treated by the current teller. We argue that a more granular understanding of this the participation role of the 'co-teller' is crucial to examine how co-telling is achieved