Multimodal practice of participation in a complex and dynamic framework

Based on the argument that the resources we use in conversation are highly adaptable, we focus on the collaborative and temporally organised character of interaction in order to describe how speakers display participation. Drawing especially on Goffman's and Goodwin's work, we analyse how players of family board and card games use different resources to indicate shifts in participation frameworks. Moreover, our sequential analysis of four excerpts focusing on describing talk, gaze, body posture, gesture, and the handling of artefacts reveal an overlapping of participation frameworks. Participants orient to gaming as an overall structuring activity, but they will simultaneously accomplish individual actions and form ephemeral groups in order to co-construct specific action trajectories that will nevertheless interact with the overarching activity. Our results illustrate both the patterns in interaction as well as its non-linear and emergent character.