2015 Volume 48, issue 2 is now out. Look out for these articles:

Maurice Nevile
The embodied turn in research on language and social interaction

I use the term the embodied turn to mean the point when interest in the body became established among researchers on language and social interaction, exploiting the greater ease of video-recording. This review paper tracks the growth of “embodiment” in over 400 papers published in Research on Language and Social Interaction from 1987-2013….. more

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Asta Cekaite
The coordination of talk and touch in adults’ directives to children: touch and social control

Adults sometimes accompany the directives they issue to children about their actions and movements with bodily contact (for example, shoving, guiding, or pushing). This article explores the interactional uses and meanings of such combinations of spoken directive and bodily contact that involves touch, in data from families and primary educational settings in Sweden….. more

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Camilla Lindholm
Parallel Realities: The Interactional Management of Confabulation in Dementia Care Encounters

Persons with dementia sometimes confabulate (that is, utter statements unaware of their falsity). This threatens the shared world that is normally presumed as the basis for communication. Co-participants then have to choose between acquiescing in the confabulation, being non-committal, or indeed correcting the speaker….. more

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Aug Nishizaka and Masafumi Sunaga
Conversing while massaging: Multidimensional asymmetries of multiple activities in interaction

Aug Nishizaka

This study draws on video-recordings of interaction in footbath

volunteering, an activity that was performed at many emergency shelters after the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred on March 11, 2011. In this activity, volunteers massage the evacuees’ hands while bathing their feet to provide them with a few moments of relaxation. We explore ways of organizing these two sub-activities performed in parallel ….more

Masafumi Sunaga

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Shuya Kushida
Using names for referring without claiming shared knowledge:
Name-quoting descriptors in Japanese

When a speaker refers to someone or something in talk-in-interaction, s/he may be doing more than simply referring with a reference form. This article examines a type of reference form, “name-quoting descriptor” (e.g., “person named X”), used in Japanese. I show that the name-quoting descriptor is used for claiming the referent’s “epistemic distance”…..more