Waiting and talking: interaction among unacquainted individuals in medical practices in Italy.

My PhD thesis explores spontaneous interaction occurring among unacquainted people in medical practices in Italy. It is part of the binational project The First Five Words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space developed and coordinated by Elwys De Stefani (KU Leuven) and Lorenza Mondada (Universität Basel). Based on a corpus of 20 hours of naturalistic video-data collected in the regions Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Sicily (Italy), where Italian, Friulian and Sicilian are spoken, my research addresses a phenomenon that is both of sociological and linguistic interest, i.e., ‘waiting’. Individuals entering a waiting room incidentally find themselves in co-presence with other, most often unacquainted persons, with whom they may choose to talk. ‘Waiting’ is thus a social, intersubjective experience. The aim of my research is to understand how ‘waiting’ is interactionally achieved in this specific setting: How do newcomers and pre-present people collaboratively achieve co-presence in the waiting area of a medical practice? How do they find their place in a room that is populated by (mostly) unacquainted visitors? In many cases, unacquainted waiting individuals engage in conversation with each other: How do they initiate it? In bilingual regions, how do individuals negotiate the language(s) of the interaction or agree on one common language for the interaction? 

I will address these questions drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974; Mondada, 2018a). First, I zero in on how individuals enter the medical practice and how they establish co-presence with other ‘co-waiters’. Often, they will address a short greeting to co-present individuals, thereby incidentally offering a language sample (Mondada, 2018b). Second, I examine the practices they deploy to constitute a not overtly visible queue, establishing the order of turns to access the service. My dissertation shows that the organisation and progression of the service is not only interactionally achieved between visitors and the service personnel, but also among visitors who are engaged in a symmetrical relationship while going about similar activities (e.g., waiting). Lastly, I devote a substantial part of my thesis to the analysis of the linguistic and embodied practices individuals deploy when engaging in conversation with unacquainted ‘co-waiters’ and to the ways in which interactants establish the language(s) of the encounter. 

When engaging in symmetrical encounters, visitors may initiate question-answer sequences related to the order of the service, or they may engage in interaction to share a moment of sociability, engaging in ‘mundane talk’ (De Stefani & Horlacher, 2018) or offering unsolicited assistance to co-present persons. The study contributes to conversation analytic research on ‘openings’ (Schegloff, 1968, 1986), documenting a complex setting where the transition from unfocused to focused interaction (Goffman, 1963) goes hand in hand with the progressive transformation of the participation framework (Goffman, 1981; De Stefani & Mondada, 2018, in prep.).