Leaning and recipient intervening questions in Mandarin conversation

In naturally occurring conversation, the recipient not only listens to the speaker, but also actively participates in the construction and negotiation of the ongoing talk. The recipient sometimes intervenes into the speaker's turn before it is brought to a possible completion, and one practice is initiating questions related to the ongoing talk. These questions have no direct contribution to the progress of the current project, and they impede the progressivity of the speaker's turn. While most research on recipient interventions focuses on the structure and function of the intervening sequences, this study examines the body movements involved in the production of the recipient interventions. Drawing on the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this article explores the role of body movements in the production of recipient intervening questions in Mandarin face-to-face conversation. A recurrent pattern of body movement co-occurs with the recipient intervening questions. That is, the recipient leans toward the speaker when initiating the question and holds the leaning body until the response is provided. Leaning visually displays the recipient's orientation to his/her question as disjunctive and disaligned with the speaker's ongoing turn and activity in progress. Holding of the lean is a resource usable by the recipient to mobilize response to the intervening questions. This study shows that leaning is relevant to the organization of the recipient intervening question answer sequences in Mandarin conversation. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.