Talking and driving: Multiactivity in the car

Car conversations constitute a perspicuous setting, characterized by multiactivity (i.e., by an engagement in multiple simultaneous activities, as talking and driving). Based on a corpus of videorecordings of various naturally occurring car journeys, the paper focuses on the way in which participants coordinate their multiactivity in either convergent or divergent ways. It shows how they mobilize various embodied multimodal resources, such as talk, gesture, gaze, head movements, and body postures in order to display their current engagement in one or more activities, in a way highly sensitive to the sequential organization of talk.