Prof. Dr. Pentti Haddington

Prof. Dr. Pentti Haddington

University of Oulu

Managing multiple activities in multimodal interaction

In this talk, I build on some recent research on multiactivity in social interaction. I will begin with a recap of ‘sequence’ and ‘sequence organisation’ and Mondada’s findings on the organisation of multiactivity. Then, by focusing on examples and analyses of two ‘multiactivity’ phenomena – parents accounting for not progressing a request sequence initiated by a child on the grounds of being involved in another activity (Vatanen and Haddington, submitted) and how participants in workplaces monitor an emerging activity before transitioning to the emerging activity (Kamunen and Haddington 2020) – I will discuss the implications of understanding ‘sequentiality’, ‘temporality’ and ‘multimodality’. The materials in the talk come from video-recorded naturally occurring interactions in families, workplaces and at homes. The languages in the data are Finnish and English. The presented research builds on research done in the project iTask: Linguistic and embodied features of interactional multitasking.