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This study investigates the practice of "sounding for others," wherein one person vocalizes to enact someone else's putatively ongoing bodily sensation. We argue that it constitutes a collaborative way of performing sensorial experiences. Examples include producing cries with others' strain or pain and parents sounding an "mmm" of gustatory pleasure on their infant's behalf. Vocal sounds, their loudness, and duration are specifically deployed for instructing bodily experiences during novices' real-time performance of various activities, such as tasting food for the first time or straining during a Pilates exercise. Vocalizations that are indexically tied to the body provide immediate displays of understanding and empathy that may be explicated further through lexicon. The existence of this practice challenges the conceptualization of communication as a transfer of information from an individual agent -- even regarding assumedly individual body sensations -- instead providing evidence of the joint nature of action and supporting dialogic theories of communication, including when language-marginal vocalizations are used.

In this article we investigate spoken professional interaction at construction sites in Sweden, where workers from Poland, Ukraine and Estonia are temporarily employed as carpenters, ground workers and kitchen installers. We study how the workers use resources associated with different languages and how these resources are mobilized along with embodied resources for meaning-making. The analysis aims at investigating what social space the workers construct by going between or beyond different linguistic structures, as defined in the theory of translanguaging. The study is based on Linguistic Ethnography and Conversation Analysis is used for close analysis. We focus on instances of translanguaging, such as Swedish-sounding institutionalized keywords, practices of receptive multilingualism and the search for communicative overlaps in repertoires. The findings from busy construction sites show that the stratifying aspect gives some workers a voice in the organization, while others remain silent. Hence, it is primarily professionals functioning as team leaders, who talk to different occupational categories and use resources associated with different languages. The data provide an opportunity to investigate the theory of translanguaging and its transformative power in relation to professional settings that are linguistically diverse, but also strictly hierarchical.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbs of perception are known for their prolific use in various non-literal functions that are usually argued to have developed from their denotational semantics (San Roque, Kendrick, Norcliffe & Majid 2018). In this study we document interactional practices involving the Estonian 2nd person verb form näed 'you see' to demonstrate that its usage is anchored in face-to-face situations where the speaker guides a co-present other's visual attention. Through multimodal analysis we show how näed is coordinated with the participants' body orientations, gestures, and gazes to point to visually available proof for one's current arguments, rendering it an evidential meaning even in its most "literal" uses of seeing, when a co-participant is invited to consider the visual evidence. We argue that the spatially anchored uses constitute a natural habitat of verbs of seeing, as visual perception is a mutually calibrated interactional accomplishment. Relevant syntactic constructions emerge in real time conversation where näed, calling for a visual orientation, is either preceded or followed by clausal specifications of what is to be seen, which makes it look like a particle. This challenges the argument that perception verbs start out as syntactic predicates in full clauses to then develop other uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 manager's 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. (Labour migration, multilingualism, manual work, language broker) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cataphoric pronouns have been characterized as being co-referential with a word that comes later. Considering that talk is produced in real time, with little benefit of knowing what is yet to come, participants understand cataphoric pro-forms to be projecting more talk. Projection is a crucial interactive resource, as it enables speakers to align with the ongoing talk and to initiate subsequent contributions in a timely manner. The study looks at how Estonian pro-forms are systematically used to project either a word (phrase) or a clause in interaction. The patterns discussed are not universal and it will be suggested that projecting word (phrases) with pro-forms is a characteristic of a nonprepositional language with no articles, and that pro-form projection can be especially useful in a free word order language. As many pro-forms do not end up with a co-referential word, projection provides a better account of their function. The article underlines the necessity of studying grammar as a temporal phenomenon. (Contains 3 tables and 6 footnotes.)