As pointed out in the introduction to this important book, interaction is at the heart of our social lives and interpersonal relationships. It is multiform, multidimensional and multifunctional, and to adequately describe its complexity, interactional linguistic studies need to incorporate syntax, vocabulary, prosody, pragmatics and non-verbal cues. Given the essential and complex role of interaction, it is strange that comprehensive studies of this type have been lacking in French until now, compared to several other languages that have received more attention in this regard. This book makes a significant contribution to filling the void, meeting its aims of providing a synthesis of the existing research in French in this field and of presenting the principles and methods of analysis in interactional linguistics.
Chapter I deals with the most important aspects of spoken interaction: the immediacy (temporality), the role of each participant in its co-creation, its situated nature (context) and variety of resources (multimodality). The necessity for micro-detailed analysis is introduced early on and maintained (and exemplified) throughout the book. Traverso illustrates the spontaneous nature of interaction with examples of hesitation, repair and intonation, and shows how these components are to be transcribed to accurately represent meaning in interaction. She illustrates how, through their reactions to preceding discourse, participants continually adapt their contributions to their interlocutor, resulting in interaction that both shapes and is shaped by the ever-evolving context. A final section introduces the complexity and multimodality of interaction: as well as what is said, the participants’ gaze, gestures, movements and other non-verbal communication must be taken into account.
Chapters II and III are dedicated to the turn in interaction. Chapter II describes the internal organisation of the turn (i.e. turn construction units, transition relevant places, simple and multi-unit turns) and turn-taking in various interactional settings, including overlaps. It is interesting that neither pauses nor latching are explicitly dealt with. This may be because latching is such a common feature of spoken French that it is considered a normal part of the turn-taking system, unlike in English for example, where latching is less usual (Béal, Reference Béal2010; Mullan, Reference Mullan2010). Chapter III focuses on the actions achieved by turns within co-constructed interaction, beginning with adjacency pairs, their sequential implications, and the consequences for turn construction (syntactically, semantically and interactionally). A more detailed section on multimodal exchanges is also present in this chapter. Subsequent sections outline organisational preference (including the concepts of preferred and dispreferred responses), the notion of exchanges, and Goffman’s participation framework (Reference Goffman1981).
Repair, both self- and other-initiated, and its various sources and interactional functions are the focus of Chapter IV. Traverso details the types of repair required (e.g. pronunciation, lexical, syntactical etc.). Another reference to the importance of non-verbal communication here illustrates how what initially appears to be an example of self-repair is actually a case of the speaker adapting her turn to her interlocutor.
In Chapter V, Traverso discusses interactional activities (e.g. offering a drink, talking about one’s problems), breaking them down into openings, closings, and the body of the interaction, which can itself comprise several activities. She is particularly interested in how interactants negotiate the activities and how they transition from one activity to another through the use of recapitulative utterances, questions, announcements, discourse markers and so on.
Chapter VI is dedicated to what Traverso refers to as multimodal ‘resources’ (143) in interaction, both verbal and non-verbal, but also non-standard creative and/or unexpected constructions, in the form of noises, sounds, prosody, gestures, posture and gaze.
Chapter VII presents a detailed description of the data collection process and its ethical and technical developments. This is followed by a comprehensive discussion of transcription principles and conventions, including the more recent trend for including video screen capture or graphic images in examples, to illustrate multimodal configurations.
The rather unexpected abrupt ending to the book is mitigated by a comprehensive bibliography and a useful glossary of terms. This, together with numerous detailed examples (many of which are helpfully and innovatively accompanied by illustrative images and/or links to audio and video files) and clear explanations, in French, of terms such as recipient design (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, Reference Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson1974) make this a very useful resource for readers. The emphasis on non-verbal communication is also a welcome inclusion.
While the author references studies on spoken interaction in English throughout the book, she clearly focuses on French. A brief discussion on how some of the interactional aspects covered differ from other languages would not have gone amiss, however. For example, the aforementioned excluded features of pausing and latching are (culturally) important components of interaction. The specificities of French turn-taking might also have been highlighted, or at least referenced, to enable the reader to investigate further. These are minor omissions in what is otherwise an excellent addition to the literature.
In her introduction, Traverso mentioned a third objective of her book: to encourage the scholarly community to contribute to the field of French interactional linguistics. Her clear, detailed and methodical approach will serve as an excellent example to those who wish to do so, and appeal to students, researchers and teachers of languages and linguistics along the way. It is quite incredible that such a comprehensive and systematic work on spoken interactional French did not exist until now. Given her previous publications, Traverso was the most appropriate person to produce this volume, and those of us who work on spoken French in interaction will benefit greatly from this significant contribution to the field.
