Towards a Proto-Language of Emotions (?) - Response Cries as an Interactional Achievement

"We provide micro-interactional analysis of a series of motion gaming sessions (Gregersen, 2011) with a focus on response cries (Goffman, 1978, 1981). We use Conversation Analysis (CA) to analyze interactions in their situatedness and moment-by-moment unfolding (Schegloff, Sacks and Jefferson, 1977). We bring evidence that, although speakers sometimes communicate by means of non-lexicalized, subvocalized, interjections and vocalizations, they still manage to understand and coordinate each other. Extracts are taken from two corpora. One is the (2010) SISS-Corpus, consisting of eight hours of video-recordings of groups of teenage students filmed in their school while playing digital games on a Nintendo Wii console. Participants speak their L1 and select different socio-stratic varieties (Tempesta, 1995; 2000; 2005) of Italian. The second corpus (2009-2012) Multi-Wii- consists of eleven hours of video-recordings of groups of multilingual speakers recorded at University of Luxembourg. Participants select English, French and German (L2) as lingua franca. Data show that response cries develop into an ‘intersubjective’ (Schegloff, 1991; Aarsand and Aronsson, 2009) language, and constitute a mutually understandable form of interaction shared by participants. In an evolutionary and developmental perspective, response cries may be thought of as a physiological, vocalized protolanguage of emotions, speakers use socially, for indexical purposes (Heritage and Raymond, 2005); to express stance (Heritage, 2012), and co-construct emotion as an interactional achievement (Schegloff, 1988). The contribution discusses the process by which cognitive –emotional- states are brought to life via embodiment in interaction (Goodwin, 2011) through language and other physiological evolutions like gestures and facial kinetics (Birdwhistell, 1970)."