Sequence-initial pointing: Spotlighting what just happened as a cause of a new sequence

Abstract

Drawing on microanalysis of interaction, this study examines the practice a pointing gesture accomplishes in initiating a new sequence in relation to what just happened when another line of interaction is still developing. Specifically, it is an investigation of the cases in which a participant points at a current or adjacent prior speaker with their index finger, comments on their current or adjacent prior action, and laughs. Such pointing spotlights what the target is currently doing or just did and locates them as a cause of the laughter. The pointing participant then invites laughter from others by shifting their gaze toward others while continuing to point. The analysis shows that such practice presents new participation statuses of the recipients and enables the producer of the pointing to initiate a teasing sequence; the gaze shift can invite laughter from others while the pointing indicates the target of the teasing. The study thus reveals interactional tasks of pointing gestures beyond their referential function.

Keywords

Pointing gesture conversation analysis multimodality participation status

Introduction

Actions in interaction normally occur in sequence (Schegloff, 2007). A current action can be a response to the preceding action or a cue for the next action. However, in natural conversation, a conversational participant sometimes comments on or talks about what the prior speaker said or did rather than responding to it. Consider the following excerpt (in Japanese):

Excerpt 1

1 A: dondon hoogen dashitara= ((gazes at D)) Why don’t you speak in your dialect more? 2 B: =n hmm 3 (1.0) 4 D: hooge[n nara n no yo. I can’t speak in my dialect. 5 A: [dara: tte ittara ii yan ((gazes at D)) You should use “dara:.” 6 D: hhh 7 C: →ii yan tte(h)i(h)tta (h)°i[(h)ma°(h)?°((points at A)) He just said “ii yan.” 8 D: [heh hehe

The excerpt is a conversation among four Japanese college students. In line 5, A suggests to D that she should use a final particle, dara (dara is a final particle used in the area where D is from). Therefore, it becomes relevant that D will respond to that suggestion in the next turn. However, what happens subsequently is not D’s response to A’s suggestion but C’s report that A just uttered yan, a non-standardized final particle (‘He just said ii yan’ in line 7). Instead of producing an action that moves the ongoing sequence forward, C produces an action outside of the sequence-in-progress. Moreover, C is not the addressee of A’s prior suggestion but an unaddressed recipient (Goffman, 1981), that is, a recipient who is not a target of A’s prior suggestion. C takes a turn when D’s turn is expected, thus interrupting the ongoing suggestion sequence and initiating a new sequence by topicalizing A’s prior action.

Note that when doing so, C points at A with her index finger (line 7). The present study focuses on this type of pointing directed at the prior speaker when the producer of the pointing is talking about what the prior speaker just said or did. While most previous research on index finger pointing in interaction has dealt with its referential function, only a few studies have revealed other interactional practices by pointing (Mondada, 2007; Morimoto, 2019; Sugiura, 2011, 2019; Yasui, 2017, 2019). Adding to this research, this study focuses on what a pointing gesture can accomplish in interaction beyond simply indexing its target.

Research in conversation analysis, a micro-analytic approach to interaction, has revealed how multimodal resources in interaction, including language, gesture, gaze, facial expression, posture, surrounding space, and use of objects, mutually elaborate, and constitute an action by their juxtaposition and co-occurrence (e.g. Streeck et al., 2011). Likewise, pointing gestures do not work alone but alongside the speaker’s language and other bodily conduct as well as the recipients’ bodily conduct within a given context and interactional environment (Goodwin, 2003b, 2007; Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000; Mondada, 2012, 2014; Streeck, 2017). Based on the microanalytic approach to interaction, this study analyzes pointing gestures with respect to their placement and coordination with other resources in interaction.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. First, I present relevant research on pointing gestures in interaction. Next, I describe the focus and data used in this study. Then, an analysis based on the data is provided. Finally, I present a discussion and the conclusions.

Pointing in interaction

The basic function of pointing gestures, one of the most frequently employed communicative gestures, is to specify and direct attention to an object, person, location, or direction (referential/deictic function) (Clark, 2003; Kendon, 2004; Kita, 2003). Pointing is diverse in its target; people do not only point at something concrete and visible in the immediate space but also at empty spaces (McNeill, 1992; McNeill et al., 1993) or even something imaginary (Stukenbrock, 2014). Pointing can be produced in various forms, such as by the index finger, thumb, palm, extended arm, using an object, etc. (Kendon, 2004). Pointing is also one of the first gestures an infant acquires (Capirci et al., 2005; Moore et al., 2019). Therefore, pointing gestures have been studied in different disciplines (Kita, 2003). Among these, an interactional approach using conversational data treated pointing as a ‘joint action’ between its producer and the addressee (Clark, 2005) rather than the conduct of an individual producer, revealing how referencing through pointing is achieved interactionally (Goodwin, 2003b; Hindmarsh and Heath, 2000; Mondada, 2012, 2014; Streeck, 2017).

Speakers produce pointing in coordination with the addressee’s gaze, body movement, or body direction so that the addressee can see the target properly. Goodwin (2003a, 2003b, 2007) demonstrates that pointing constitutes a meaningful act in relation to the surrounding environment, the activity in which participants are engaged, and the accompanying talk and other bodily resources. Thus, the target of pointing and what it accomplishes cannot be understood through the pointing gesture alone. Instead, the gesture is ‘environmentally coupled’; the talk that accompanies the gesture, other bodily conduct, and the surrounding environment mutually contextualize what the pointing indexes (Goodwin, 2007).

While most studies on pointing gestures deal with their deictic referential function, Mondada (2007) shows that pointing is also used as a resource for establishing speakership. Examining a work meeting of a team of agronomists and computer scientists, Mondada (2007) examines two sequential positions in which pointing gestures occur. At a turn-initial position, pointing shows incipient speakership, and at a pre-turn initial position, it can be used as a claim for the next turn before the prior turn is completed. She describes that participants’ pointing gestures in relation to maps and other documents generally start before a transition relevance place (TRP) – a possible completion of a turn, where a speaker change becomes relevant – and project their producers’ self-selection for the next turn.

Similar to the present study, some studies have investigated pointing that is directed at a conversational participant. Those studies have shown that they can accomplish more than simply referring and drawing attention to the target. Holler’s (2009) experimental study shows that a speaker uses a pointing gesture directed toward a recipient when communicating mutually shared knowledge and attempting to elicit a response. A similar case is investigated in a conversation analytic study; Morimoto (2019) demonstrates how pointing toward a recipient while talking about a past event can indicate that the past event belongs to the recipient and act as a ‘reminiscence recognition solicit’ (Lerner, 1992: 254).

When a pointing gesture is directed specifically at a prior speaker, it can refer to the prior speaker’s utterance; a conversational participant points to a previous speaker to indicate agreement (Healy, 2012; Sugiura, 2011) or cite what they have just said (Bavelas et al., 1992). In a previous study, I demonstrated a similar case in storytelling sequences; when a speaker points to a current or an adjacent prior speaker and starts to tell a story, the pointing gesture can indicate that the story is triggered by what the current or prior speaker has just said (Yasui, 2017). Jefferson (1978) argues that spontaneous stories are locally occasioned and often triggered by ongoing conversation. When a topic is triggered by what a speaker has just said, a participant may produce a token that displays sudden remembering of something, such as oh (a ‘disjunct marker’), and provides the basis for storytelling. Yasui (2017) shows that with a display of sudden remembering, pointing gestures directed at a current or adjacent prior speaker indicate that the source of the remembering is contained within what the current or prior speaker has just said. As such, pointing is used as a ‘touched-off’ marker (Jefferson, 1978; Sacks, 1992), as the following excerpt from Yasui (2017) illustrates. In this excerpt, a participant who produces pointing starts a story. Immediately after S2 states her perspective and seeks confirmation from S3, instead of responding to it, S3 points to S2 while displaying that she has come up with something, then starts to tell the story that she has just recalled. The pointing directed at S2 indicates that something has been triggered by what S2 has just said, motivating the initiation of a telling at this moment in talk.

Excerpt 2

As seen above, after S2 utters, ‘They (the dogs) should be able to judge themselves what they can’t eat, shouldn’t they?’ (lines 1-2), S3 inhales sharply and points at S2, indicating that she has come up with something (line 3, figure 1). S3 then starts a story that illustrates how what S2 has just said applies to her dog; her dog only eats the meat on the skewer and leaves the skewer as it is, knowing what he can and cannot eat. Thus, a pointing gesture, through precise coordination with other behaviors, such as inhalation, can be employed as a resource to make a semantic and sequential tie between what precedes it (S2′s utterance) and what follows it (S3’s story). It not only refers to the prior speaker’s utterance but also situates what the prior speaker has said as the source of the current utterance.

When a pointing gesture is produced before the current speaker finishes their turn, the timing of the production of pointing plays an important role in locating what the gesture aims to accomplish. In the following example, Rebecca produces pointing while Claire continues talking. The pointing gesture’s timing signals the exact moment in the current speaker’s talk that Rebecca has come up with something to say.

Excerpt 3

Immediately after Claire has said, ‘she saw chickens running around with their heads cut off’ (lines 3-4), Rebecca opens her mouth and slightly raises her head, which indicates that she has something to say. While Claire’s turn continues, she then begins to move her right arm and produces a pointing gesture with her right index finger. Then, while Rebecca says ‘no wait’, overlapping with Claire’s utterance (line 6), she directs her pointing at Claire (Figure 2). She then holds the pointing while looking at Claire.

The moment Rebecca starts to produce this pointing gesture signals her ‘recognition point’ (Jefferson, 1973), that is, the moment she has come up with something. The pointing gesture produced during the current speaker’s turn, therefore, refers to specific items just uttered by Claire. The command ‘no wait’, which marks urgency, is heard as her attempt to stop Claire’s ongoing talk. Combined with ‘no wait’, therefore, Rebecca’s pointing gesture signals that she is claiming a turn since she has something to talk about in relation to what Claire has just said. However, Rebecca is not able to take a turn because Claire continues finishing her sentence. Thus, by holding her hand position, Rebecca maintains the relevance of her claim for a turn. After taking a turn, as seen later in the conversation, Rebecca tells a story about a movie scene featuring a chicken whose head has been cut off; the participants retrospectively understand how it is connected to Claire’s previous story (‘chickens running around with their heads cut off’).

Study focus and data

The excerpts above illustrate that a pointing gesture directed toward a current or prior speaker not only indexes the pointed-at speaker but also anaphorically refers to what the pointed-at speaker has just said, indicating it as the trigger for the storytelling that follows. The present study also deals with anaphoric pointing directed at the current or preceding speaker, referring to what has just happened and locating it as a source of a new sequence. However, it differs from the context studied by Yasui (2017) in that what happens after pointing is not a story; the pointing participant produces a comment about what the target of the pointing just said or did.

Employing conversation analysis as a methodology, we used videotaped conversational data. The analysis focuses on the construction of a turn within the sequence of actions and seeks to explain what action is constituted through a pointing gesture, utterance, and other bodily behavior, as well as what happens before and after the turn involving pointing. The data come from two sources: (1) naturally occurring, multiparty conversations among friends in English and Japanese obtained by the author,¹ and (2) video segments obtained from the ‘Sakura corpus’ in TalkBank, which includes natural conversations among college students in Japanese (MacWhinney and Wagner, 2010). In our dataset, among 73 examples of pointing directed at a conversational participant, 10 comprised pointing accompanied by an utterance commenting on the pointed-at speaker’s current or just prior utterance or behavior. The selected examples were transcribed using Jefferson’s (2004) transcript conventions. Bodily conduct is transcribed according to Mondada’s (2019) conventions (see Appendix).

Below, I attempt to demonstrate that pointing initiates a new sequence in relation to what just happened. Therefore, the aim of the study is to reveal an interactional practice of pointing gestures beyond their referential function.

Analysis

Spotlighting the current speaker’s action

Let us first look at the pointing directed at the current speaker during her turn. The current speaker’s turn is interrupted by a recipient who points at the current speaker. In Excerpt 4, five female participants, Hisa, Maya, Yumi, Tomi, and Risa, are engaging in a conversation. Prior to this excerpt, the participants talked about how reluctant they might feel about buying anti-aging cosmetic products from younger salesclerks because they would be less persuasive in selling such products to older customers. The excerpt starts after Maya, who is in her twenties, says she is using an anti-aging cosmetic product by Givenchy, an upscale cosmetic brand.

Excerpt 4

Just before this excerpt, Risa, Yumi, and Hisa indicated that they had little or no experience using Givenchy cosmetic products. In contrast, Maya indicates that she is a heavy user of their lip gloss, which she prefers to the one made by Chanel, another upscale cosmetic brand (lines 9 and 10). Hisa asks ii ‘Is that good?’ (line 11), and in response, Maya projects that she is going to give a reason why she believes Givenchy lip gloss is better than Chanel lip gloss, ‘well, Chanel glosses are. . .’ (line 17).

However, Maya’s talk is immediately interrupted by Hisa. Hisa starts to move her left arm as she utters datte ‘because’ (line 18) right after Maya says nanka shaneru ‘well, Chanel’, where more talk from Maya regarding the Chanel product is projected. In doing so, Hisa clearly interrupts Maya’s turn. She then points at Maya and utters, settokukan- ku- aru deshoo ‘(she sounds) convincing/persuasive, doesn’t she?’ (settokukan- ku- is possibly intended to be settokuryoku ‘persuasive’) (line 19) while looking at Tomi (image 4–1).²

Let us now take a close look at Hisa’s pointing directed at Maya. Since her utterance does not include a subject, which is a common feature in Japanese sentences, her pointing toward Maya may merely appear to indicate the unmentioned subject of her utterance. However, note that Hisa talks about Maya’s ongoing action and describes it as persuasive/convincing as she points at Maya. That is, the pointing not only indicates the unmentioned subject in Hisa’s utterance but also ‘spotlights’ (Streeck, 2017) and topicalizes what Maya is currently doing, that is, explaining why she prefers Givenchy lip gloss. By topicalizing and talking about Maya’s current action, Hisa starts a new sequence in relation to it. Including laughter in her utterance, she either compliments or teases Maya; she positively evaluates Maya’s explanation as convincing but laughs at the same time. Also, by ending the turn with deshoo ‘doesn’t she?’ Hisa seeks a response from others.

Thus, although Hisa interrupts Maya’s turn, her utterance elicits responses from others. Recipients’ responses show that they treat Hisa’s action as either teasing or complimenting. Risa expresses her surprise at Maya’s knowledge while laughing (lines 25 and 26). Tomi and Yumi do not laugh but express their surprise that Maya knows so much about famous cosmetic products (lines 21, 23, 24, and 27). Their laughter and expression of surprise, therefore, show that Hisa’s action constituted through pointing, utterance, and laughter, draws others’ attention to what Maya has been doing and is understood as either a compliment or teasing.³ Also, Maya, the target of Hisa’s pointing, immediately laughs in line 20, showing her understanding that her action is topicalized by Hisa.⁴

In this excerpt, therefore, Hisa’s pointing refers to and topicalizes the current speaker and her current behavior. With the accompanying utterance and the timing at which it is produced, the pointing indexes not only Maya herself but also what she is currently doing. By topicalizing what the current speaker is doing and drawing others’ attention to it, Hisa starts a new sequence in relation to it and elicit responses from others.

Spotlighting the prior speaker’s action as a trigger of laughter

Next, let us revisit Excerpt 1. Unlike the prior excerpt, in Excerpt 1, pointing is directed toward a prior speaker by an unaddressed recipient of a prior utterance. Among the four participants, C and D – two female college students – are from a rural area, while A and B—two male college students – are from a city. At the beginning of the excerpt, A suggests to D that she should use her dialect more since their conversation is recorded.

Excerpt 1’

In line 5, A suggests that D speak in her dialect using a sentence-final particle dara (‘you should use dara’:). Given that A is smiling during his utterance and the particle dara is rarely used by young people, his suggestion is to be taken as light-hearted teasing rather than a serious suggestion. Since a suggestion is the first pair part of an adjacency pair, it becomes relevant at this sequential position that a second pair part, which is either an acceptance or rejection, is produced next as a response by addressee D (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). However, in response, D only laughs slightly and indicates neither acceptance nor rejection, showing that she understands that A is not producing a serious suggestion (line 6). Then, in line 7, C, an unaddressed side participant, takes the next turn, interrupting the suggestion sequence initiated by A. As she starts her turn, C starts to point at A with her right index finger and moves her gaze from A (Image 1-1) to D (Image 1-2), and reports with laughter what A just said, ii yan tte itta ima ‘(he) said ii yan just now’ (line 7).

The focus here is C’s pointing toward A, produced while saying that A just used the dialect particle yan. As in the prior excerpt, it is again possible that this pointing simply indicates the unmentioned subject of C’s utterance. However, consider the timing at which C points to A; it is right after A’s utterance. In addition, as C points at A, she uses the time reference ima ‘just now’ and partially repeats what A just said (ii yan). As such, it is already obvious that the subject of her utterance is A, which makes C’s pointing at A redundant. Because of this redundancy, C’s pointing at A does not merely seem to complement the subject of her utterance; it also spotlights A’s adjacent prior behavior. Additionally, note that C produces laughter as she points at A and then moves her gaze from A to D. Through the laughter and pointing directed at A, C not only spotlights A’s prior behavior but also retroactively locates (part of) it as a trigger of laughter (Schegloff, 2007). More importantly, by moving her gaze from A to D as she laughs, C invites laughter from D (Jefferson, 1979).

Spotlighting what A has just said, presenting it as something laughable in front of him, and inviting laughter from D all constitute a teasing (Hajikano and Iwata, 2008; Nishizaka, 2001).⁵ C’s gaze and pointing directed to two different participants (Image 1–2) indicate different participation statuses involving the teasing; by directing her gaze at D as she laughs, C locates D as her addressee, while her pointing directed at A indicates that A is her target of teasing. This shows that C not only laughs at the funniness of A’s prior utterance but also laughs at it with D (Jefferson, 1972). That is, C’s pointing is not only indicating that what A says is the trigger of the laughter, but also turning A into the target of teasing.

Displaying the new participation statuses using pointing and gaze contributes to the progression of the teasing sequence initiated by C. On the one hand, D, with whom C shares the funniness, responds with laughter to C’s invitation to laugh (line 8). On the other hand, A blames others for using the dialect (‘No, I originally didn’t use ii yan, but Tatsuki uses it, right? I was influenced by him’) (lines 10–12), showing that he understands that he is treated as a target of teasing (Drew, 1987).

Here is another similar example from the conversation among the same participants. In Excerpt 5, prior to the transcribed segment, the two female participants (C and D) tell the two male participants (A and B) that they spend time with their male friends as they do with their female friends. B then asks D in line 1 whether they have their male friends pay for meals, to which D answers un ‘yeah’ (line 3) and C answers, hito ni yoru ‘depends on with whom you go’ (line 4). A then bursts into laughter, points at D, and repeats a part of D’s answer, saying, ‘oh, (she) said “yeah”, didn’t she?’ (line 5) while turning his gaze from D (Image 5-1) to B (Image 5-2), similar to what we observed in the previous excerpt.

Excerpt 5

After D and C answer B’s question, it is normally expected that B will indicate his reaction to their answers (Sacks et al., 1974). However, it is A who takes the turn right after their answers; he laughs, says e, and points at D. With the interjection e, it is indicated that he notices something in retrospect (Shimotani, 2008), and with laughter and pointing directed at D, it is shown that he notices something laughable in D’s answer. He then turns his gaze from D to B while laughing and holding the pointing directed at D (Image 5-2) and indicates to B that he found what D just said funny (‘oh, (she) said “yeah”, didn’t she?’ in line 5).⁶ As such, A orients to tease D with B and elicit laughter from him, to which B responds with silent laughter.

A’s pointing directed at D thus not only indicates his attention to D; with the accompanying talk and shift of gaze from D to B, it also spotlights what D just said, locates it as a cause of laughter, and directs B’s attention to it. As in the prior excerpt, new participation statuses of the recipients are presented; by the pointing gesture, A indicates the target of teasing, D, while his addressee B, with whom he intends to tease D, is indicated through his gaze direction. Thus, like in the prior excerpt, the pointing does not only spotlight D’s prior response; it functions to present to B that D is a target of teasing.

The participants align with the newly initiated sequence and respond to the teasing. On the one hand, B laughs silently with A. On the other hand, C and D both attempt to deny any funniness or strangeness in D’s answer, which shows that they took A’s action as teasing; C’s utterance (‘If your friend has a full-time job, you’ll have him buy you dinner, right?’) (line 9) supports D’s answer that she has her male friends pay for meals. D affiliates with C and says, ‘A lot of my friends have full-time jobs’ (line 10). This shows that the participation statuses that are indicated through a pointing gesture indeed affect the following interaction.

When pointing is not attended to by an addressee

The final excerpt presents a case in which the action by a producer of pointing is not attended to by its intended addressee. Like the previous excerpts, this excerpt also demonstrates that a participant employs a pointing gesture toward a prior speaker when attempting to initiate a new sequence in relation to what the prior speaker just said or did. In Excerpt 6 below, the conversation takes place among three participants – Haru, Kou, and Shoko – when Kou and Shoko are visiting Haru’s house.

Excerpt 6

Haru, who is in the kitchen, is preparing to serve a specialty food from Kou’s hometown while pre-indicating that he is going to announce the name of the dish he is serving (lines 1–10). By telling Kou that it is something from Kou’s hometown, Haru indicates that the dish is something that is likely to be familiar to Kou. Kou aligns with what Haru is doing by repeating his utterances, showing that he is ready to be informed of the name of the food. However, when Haru announces its name (lines 14 and 16), Kou immediately says that he does not remember it, displaying that it is not something that he is familiar with (lines 17–18). Note that Haru uses honorifics when announcing the food name; since he does not usually speak formally to Kou, this ‘formal’ announcement sounds exaggerated and implies a playful tone.

Because of this exaggerated announcement by Haru, Kou’s response, which shows his lack of interest in the dish, seems to have come across as funny to Shoko, the side participant of the prior utterance. Shoko laughs immediately after Kou’s response to Haru and utters, nande ‘why’ (line 19). She then moves her gaze to Haru and points at Kou (Image 6–1) while uttering, ima zenzen ‘(just) now, not at all’ (line 20). With this time reference ima ‘(just) now’ and its temporal proximity to Kou’s response, Shoko’s pointing toward Kou seems to refer to Kou’s prior reaction showing his unfamiliarity with the food Haru announced.

However, seeing that Haru looks down while serving food and does not see her pointing, Shoko immediately retracts the pointing and moves her gaze back to Kou (she then briefly looks at Haru again before quickly moving her gaze back to Kou) while uttering kuitsuki ga nakatta desu yo ne ‘(you) didn’t show any interest, did you?’ with laughter (lines 22 and 23) (Images 6-2 and 6-3). The fact that Shoko points at Kou only when her gaze is directed at Haru and retracts the pointing as soon as she moves her gaze away from Haru shows that her pointing is produced with the intention of being seen by him. She first utters nande ‘why’ at the beginning of her utterance, but she ends her sentence in a form that requests confirmation from Kou, using yo ne ‘did you?’ That is, as Shoko changes the addressee in the middle of the production of a sentence, she adjusts the utterance in the course of its production for the new addressee, similar to the example presented by Goodwin (1979). She originally attempts to draw Haru’s attention to Kou’s immediately preceding behavior and indicates its funniness to Haru, but because of Haru’s lack of attention, Shoko retracts the pointing, looks back at Kou, and changes the design of her utterance in a way that requests confirmation from Kou. However, While Shoko changes the addressee of her ongoing talk from Haru to Kou, Kou does not respond to Shoko; instead, he looks at Haru and further emphasizes how unfamiliar the food is for him (line 24). Since Shoko fails to draw Haru’s attention and elicit his laughter, Shoko’s intervention does not initiate a new sequence.

Thus, like in previous excerpts, pointing toward a prior speaker is employed when a participant attempts to elicit laughter from others regarding the prior speaker’s action and initiate a new sequence. However, as a visible resource, pointing is to be seen by others and intricately coordinated with others’ behaviors. The speaker (Shoko) monitors her intended recipient’s (Haru’s) attention while producing pointing. Because Haru does not attend to her pointing or utterance, Shoko modifies the trajectory of her action and does not succeed in spotlighting and topicalizing the just prior action by Kou, nor does she set up a new participation framework for a new sequence.

Conclusion

This study has investigated an interactional function of a pointing gesture directed at a current or adjacent prior speaker. It is demonstrated that such pointing does not only refer to its target; produced immediately after the prior speaker’s utterance or during the current speaker’s utterance while quoting or describing what the prior speaker said or did, it can also single out and spotlight a part of what the target just said or did (when directed at a prior speaker) or is currently doing (when directed at a current speaker). As a referential gesture, pointing is a strong device to draw others’ attention (Clark, 2003). Pointing at the current or prior speaker, combined with verbal conduct, can thus spotlight and call others’ attention toward a specific part of the target’s action. What a pointing gesture can refer to is not always determined only through its direction but can be specified through its timing and accompanying utterance in interaction.

In all the excerpts examined, instead of responding to the prior or current speaker’s action, a participant laughs and comments on what the prior or current speaker says or does (meta-commenting). In doing so, they indicate that the producer of the pointing found what is occurring, or has already occurred, laughable. When laughing at a place where something funny has not overtly been told, one can retrospectively indicate something laughable just happened (Schegloff, 2007). A pointing gesture and a comment on the prior or current speaker’s action accompanying such laughter indicate that the cause of laughter is what has occurred in the ongoing interaction. Moreover, by partially repeating what the target of the pointing has just said while laughing (a ‘laugh-token’ repeat; Jefferson, 1972) or describing what the target of the pointing has just done while laughing, the source of laughter is indicated more precisely.

Additionally, the participant who produces pointing shifts their gaze toward others while continuing to point at the same target when they orient to invite laughter from others. In doing so, they initiate a new sequence in relation to what the prior or current speaker says or does. Hence, pointing can present the participation statuses of the recipients for the newly initiated sequence; through distributing pointing and gaze to different participants, a speaker can allocate the participants as either the target of teasing or an addressee of an utterance. Presenting a new participation framework for the new sequence as such, they accomplish ‘laughing at’ and ‘laughing with’ (Jefferson, 1972: 300) simultaneously. However, since a pointing is a visual resource, it has to be coordinated with other participants’ attention. As the final excerpt shows, when the pointing does not elicit attention from an intended addressee, initiation of a new sequence is unsuccessful.

Previous studies have revealed gestures’ forward-looking aspects in that they can project forthcoming action or turn-taking (Mondada, 2007; Schegloff, 1984; Streeck, 2009; Streeck and Hartge, 1992). In contrast, the pointing gesture examined in this study bridges the sequences. Looking both backward and forward, it anaphorically refers to the immediate past and indicates that the trigger of the new sequence is in what just happened. However, the present study examined only a limited sequential environment in which a pointing gesture is employed. Future research can examine more diverse physical and sequential environments to further our understanding of what we do with pointing.

Footnotes

Appendix

Multimodal details are transcribed based on Mondada (2019) as follows:

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and a reviewer for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21K00524.

Notes

Author biography

Eiko Yasui is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University, Japan. She received her PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She studies embodied conduct and talk in human interaction using conversation analysis. Her current research involves the relationship between Japanese grammar and embodied conduct during physical activities.

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