The ubiquity of multilingual interaction: Self- and other-categorization in openings of service encounters as displayed through language and embodied conduct

This thesis, supervised by Elwys De Stefani (KU Leuven) and Lorenza Mondada (U. Basel), is part of the research project The first five words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

It examines how unacquainted individuals use a great variety of both vocal and embodied resources to jointly achieve the openings of (multi-person) service encounters in a multilingual environment, while displaying (and dealing with displays of) different kinds of (linguistic) identities.

The analysis is based on a 35-hour video corpus collected in tourism offices in Belgium (both Flanders and Brussels), where participants use an array of languages and language varieties (French, Dutch, English, West-Flemish, etc.) in the opening of the encounters. The encounters are transcribed using Jeffersonian (2004) and Mondadian (2018a) conventions for vocal and embodied behaviour, respectively. For the analysis of some excerpts (e.g., those in which the language varieties used by the participants are analysed), the International Phonetic Alphabet (1999) (IPA) was used.

Within the research tradition of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, 1992), openings are a widely examined topic: it is in and through openings that co-present individuals become participants in interaction — by establishing the sequential organisation of interaction and displaying relevant identities (see Schegloff, 1967, 1968, 1986 as well as Zhang, 2005 on phone call openings, and Pillet-Shore, 2008 on face-to-face openings). Research on how unacquainted individuals achieve interactional openings remains somewhat limited (but see De Stefani & Mondada 2010, 2018; D’Antoni et al., 2022), especially in settings where the interactants cannot take for granted their respective language competences (Heller, 1978).

One of the resources participants use are greetings — a powerful “adjacency pair” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973) which interactants-to-be use along other resources (e.g., gaze, spatial positioning) to organise their coordinated entry into (service) encounters (see Fox & Heinemann, 2020; Hausendorf & Mondada, 2017; Hochuli, 2019; Sorjonen & Raevaara, 2014), as well as to (re)negotiate the language of the interaction (Mondada, 2018b).

The three analytic chapters of the thesis are structured around different aspects of interactional openings. Firstly, there is the issue of the number of participants involved in the interaction, to which the first two chapters are dedicated. Although recent research (De Stefani & Mondada, 2010, 2018; D’Antoni et al., 2022) has analysed how unacquainted individuals enter into interaction with each other through the deployment of both vocal and embodied resources, detailed multimodal analyses of such interactional openings (particularly multilingual ones, but see Mondada, 2018b; Hänggi, in prep.) remain relatively rare, and the focus is usually on dyadic interactions where only two people greet each other, with few studies examining multi-person openings (but see Albert and Raymond, 2019 and Duranti, 1997b on collective greetings). The first two analytical chapters of the thesis seek to address this research gap by examining how participants use talk and embodied resources such as gaze and nodding to achieve interactional openings, with the first chapter focusing on dyadic encounters, and the second analytical chapter examining non-dyadic encounters i.e., encounters with three or more participants. Thus, these chapters show how the number of participants has implications for how the opening is actually achieved by the participants, as said participants make relevant and orient to different issues (e.g., availability, spokespersonship à la Lerner, 1993) while dealing with local contingencies through the use of various vocal (e.g. (re)doing (same language) greetings to display availability as an officer, greeting (first) as a visitor to display spokespersonship) and embodied (e.g. gaze, positioning, nodding) resources. 

The third analytical chapter extensively investigates the issue of greetings and language – particularly how greetings can be used to (re)negotiate the language of the encounter. It discusses, among others, greetings uttered in languages other than those subsequently used by the participants for the rest of the encounter (e.g. bonjour can I have a map?), potentially linguistically indeterminate (i.e., the language in which they occur is not clear) greetings such as hallo/hello, and the greeting goeiedag bonjour and its many varieties commonly found in the Brussels data. The final section of this chapter extends the discussion from multilingual to multivariety interaction, as it analyses how participants use and orient to each other’s use of certain varieties of Dutch. The transcription of these excerpts also prompts a methodological reflection on how to offer an “emic” (language) description as made relevant by the participants (Pike, 1982), while having to rely on the researchers’ “etic” (Pike, 1982) descriptions of languages and their varieties and thus risking engaging in “transcriptional stereotyping” (Jefferson, 1996).  

The findings of these analyses are discussed within the framework of membership categorisation (Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2007), an interactional approach to the study of identity which emphasises the emic relevance of the categories mentioned in the analysis. 

By both examining underexplored aspects of (service) encounter openings (e.g., non-dyadic encounters) and building on results obtained by previous research on openings to potentially multilingual (service) encounters (such as Mondada, 2018, Mortensen & Hazel, 2014; Zhang, 2005; Torras & Gafaranga 2002), this thesis sets out to provide an extensive overview of how exactly participants utilise specific vocal and embodied resources to achieve the necessary interactional work (e.g. displaying availability, agreeing on the language of the encounter, among others) and thus successfully open these potentially multilingual encounters. Furthermore, the data analysed was recorded in the linguistic context of Belgium (on which little if any previous CA work has been done), where issues of (institutional) bilingualism (see also Heller, 1978) and language variety (for Dutch, in particular) are frequently made relevant by the participants. This grants the thesis a unique and authentic look at how exactly participants, in their natural interactions with each other, jointly establish the social order of this multilingual country.