To Be Recipient or Object: The Conflict and Mutual Coordination of Participation Status in Dental Interaction

Abstract

In this paper, we exemplify the ways in which patients deal with the dilemma of whether to be a recipient or an object in dental interaction. First, it is shown that a patient utilizes the dentist's utterances and movements as interactional resources and organizes his/her own behavior with the temporally available modalities within the restriction of not being able to speak while his/her mouth is open. Furthermore, while the dentist appears to coordinate his/her own behavior according to the patient's reactions, the patient takes on the appropriate participation status of either recipient or object. Patients seem to be able to deal with alternating between recipient and object by appropriately distributing multiple modalities to conversation and physical examination. Thus, meta-communication is seen in the embodied interaction coordinating the participation framework between dentist and patient.