Cultivating objects in interaction: visual motifs as meaning making practices in talk-in-interaction

This paper demonstrates how an initial indexing of objects through gesture and talk provides a residual basis for later indexical development across a stretch of discourse. I show how participants are able to perform an initial mobilization of affordances (Hutchby, 2001) of objects in the immediate surround through a combination of vocal, visual and tactile means; once indexed one way, these objects are subsequently recycled in later multimodal turn design. By tracking recurrent participant orientations to particular objects made relevant in the surround, we are able to explore further the interactional resources which mundane everyday objects provide interactants in the multimodal design of their turns-at-talk. Although the objects which feature in the data – for example notepads, tables, computer monitors – have practical functions within the social ecology of these institutional settings, they are also drawn on as resources for meaning making.