Sequence Facilitation: Grandparents Engineering Parent–Child Interactions in Video Calls

Yumei Gan; Christian Greiffenhagen; Kobin H Kendrick

doi:10.1080/08351813.2023.2170640

Sequence Facilitation: Grandparents Engineering Parent–Child Interactions in Video Calls

Yumei Gan^*, Christian Greiffenhagen, Kobin H Kendrick

^*Corresponding author for this work

Language and Linguistic Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Completing a sequence of actions is a basic problem of social organisation for participants. When a first pair-part is addressed to a not yet fully competent member, such as a young child, a third party can facilitate the completion of the sequence through diverse linguistic, embodied, and material practices. In this article, we examine such sequence facilitation in a perspicuous setting, namely grandparent-mediated video calls between migrant parents and their left-behind children in China. The analysis showed that the practices of sequence facilitation can have a retrospective or prospective orientation and involve not only linguistic practices, such as repeating the parent’s first pair-part or formulating its action, but also embodied and material practices, such as positioning the camera or physically animating the child’s body. The results shed light on the organisation of adjacency pairs in adult–child interactions and the embodied and material circumstances of their production in video- mediated communication. The data were in the Chinese dialects of Sichuan and Guizhou.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	65-88
Number of pages	24
Journal	Research on Language and Social Interaction
Volume	56
Early online date	21 Mar 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2023.2170640
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 21 Mar 2023

Bibliographical note

Access to Document

10.1080/08351813.2023.2170640

Gan et al. (2023) - preprint
© 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy.
Accepted author manuscript, 7.39 MBLicence: CC BY-NC

Cite this

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title = "Sequence Facilitation: Grandparents Engineering Parent–Child Interactions in Video Calls",

abstract = "Completing a sequence of actions is a basic problem of social organisation for participants. When a first pair-part is addressed to a not yet fully competent member, such as a young child, a third party can facilitate the completion of the sequence through diverse linguistic, embodied, and material practices. In this article, we examine such sequence facilitation in a perspicuous setting, namely grandparent-mediated video calls between migrant parents and their left-behind children in China. The analysis showed that the practices of sequence facilitation can have a retrospective or prospective orientation and involve not only linguistic practices, such as repeating the parent{\textquoteright}s first pair-part or formulating its action, but also embodied and material practices, such as positioning the camera or physically animating the child{\textquoteright}s body. The results shed light on the organisation of adjacency pairs in adult–child interactions and the embodied and material circumstances of their production in video- mediated communication. The data were in the Chinese dialects of Sichuan and Guizhou.",

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