Abstract
Formal linguistics places an idealized speaker-hearer at the center of human language (Chomsky 1965; Saussure 1966). Hearers, who are largely though not completely silent, are however, given very little attenion. Most analysis of language, including the study of talk-in-interaction, focuses almost exclusively on phenomena embedded within the stream of speech including linguistic structure, turn-constructional units, and prosody. However, within face-to-face interaction hearers use the visible organization of their bodies to display consequential participation in the talk of the moment. Speakers change the structure of emerging utterances in response to what they see their hearers doing. Hearers are thus central to the constitution of utterances, sentences, and the states of talk within which these structures emerge. Building an utterance is not only a multi-party activity, but also one constructed through the mutual elaboration of structurally different kinds of semiotic phenomena, including both the talk of the speaker, and the embodied displays of the hearer(s). How participants attend to the observability and display of each other's bodies in copresence as consequential for the collaborative organization of action is one of the central issues posed in the analysis of the relationship between interaction, language, and cognition. Such phenomena will be investigated here through analysis of a video-recording of a little girl trying to read a recipe as she makes cookies with her aunt. Within this sequence human action and cognition are organized through the ongoing construction and transformation of unfolding environments within which language structure, the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, the participants' bodies, and features of the material surround mutually elaborate each other to create meaningful configurations of action and meaning that go beyond any of their component parts.
