Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies 'more content', such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardgames, rock climbing, and opera rehearsals. Repetition of both lexical and non-lexical tokens can prolong, postpone, and generally organize segments of action as well as co-create rhythms and moves in a moment-by-moment reflexive relationship with other (non-vocalizing) participants. A crucial feature of repetitions is that they can be flexibly extended to fit the other's public performance, its launching, continuation, and projectable completion. We argue that the iconicity of repetition emerges through its indexical relationship to other bodies, as a real-time jointly achieved phenomenon.

This chapter looks at how people vocally display bodily strain. While strain sounds can be a “leakage” of an individual bodily effort, they can also be performed without tension beyond what is necessary for their production, and acted upon by co-present others. The study re-specifies the pioneering but impressionistic account of response cries by Goffman (1978) through analyzing the minute mutual temporalities of vocal and bodily strain in the recordings of naturally occurring strain grunts during physical work and body instruction. The chapter argues that strain grunts are regularly produced alongside bodily effort, with variable phonetic characteristics, with outbreaths reflecting tension release, and at moments when the success of the effort is at risk. This leads to local (re)configuration of embodied participation in the task at hand and the emergence of strain displays as having been informative.

What happens to submissions to a journal which publishes close, technically sophisticated analyses of interaction? What do its editors look for? why might it fail when others succeed? Those are questions that will interest readers of this volume, and that we shall try to answer as editors of a journal that publishes conversation-analytic and ethnomethodological (CA and EM) work. Research on Language and Social Interaction (ROLSI) is, of course, not the only journal to publish (broadly) CA and EM articles; however, it is one of the few that publishes nothing else. Our closest sister journals are Social Interaction: Video-based Studies of Human Sociality, Research on Children and Social Interaction, and Interactional Linguistics – a wonderful set of outlets which have grown up to serve the increasing appetite for EM/CA work. Our thoughts about submissions, as editors of ROLSI, probably match in many respects what our colleagues on those journals would say – all editors, of any journal, have similar managerial (and to some degree, intellectual) jobs to do. Experienced authors (some of whom have editorial experience themselves, and many of whom have been our reviewers) will recognize much of what we say, but nevertheless, it’s worth setting out our practices to throw some light into the odd murky corner, and to encourage authors – especially, new authors – to take the plunge and submit a paper. We’ll start at the unhappy first base – the immediate return with an apologetic ‘not for us’ – and work up to the submission’s triumphant revision and acceptance.

In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the managers circle of family and friends. The manager is thus both capitalising on his social relationships and reinforcing a social support network in the receiving country for the individuals involved. The article promotes our understanding of the interface between migration, multilingualism, and language brokering in the understudied blue-collar workplaces and dissects the social and economic values of linguistic resources in work migration across the Baltic Sea. The data consist of ethnographic observations of daily work routines, video recordings of interaction, and interviews.

When aiming to design for intuitive interaction, a good understanding of hu- man behavior is essential. In this chapter we dive into studies on how humans use vocalizations and prosody in everyday interaction. Contrasting six ex- amples from human-human and human-robot interaction, we highlight how insights on human practices can inform the design of robot sound in interac- tion. We present three main lessons, demonstrating that a) both human vo- calizations and robot sound are semantically underspecified, b) human sound production is embodied, and robot sound should therefore be analyzed and designed multimodally, and c) sound can be easily adapted for complex par- ticipation.

While the lexico-grammatical and embodied practices in various instructional activities have been explored in-depth (Keevallik, 2013; Simone & Galatolo, 2020), the vocal capacities deployed by instructors have not been in focus. This study looks at how a Pilates instructor coaches student bodies by modulating the prosodic production of verbal instructions and adjusting vocal quality in reflexive coordination with the students ongoing movements. We show how the body of one participant can be expressed and enhanced by anothers voice in a simultaneous assembly of action and argue for the dialogical conceptualization of a speaker. These voice-body assemblies constitute evidence of how actions were brought about jointly rather than constructed individually.