Getting people to “see” an object: transitional directives in video mediated encounters

A lot of conversation analytic work has focused on actions aiming to get someone to do something, both under the label ‘requests’ and ‘directives’. More recently, the outcome of such actions has come into focus as ‘recruitment’ (Drew & Couper-Kuhlen, 2014; Kendrick & Drew, 2016). Based on a video corpus of video mediated conversations between professionals and citizens in a public service organisation, this paper contributes to the study of embodied directives in human interaction. Drawing on an EM/CA multimodality methodology (e.g. Streeck, Goodwin, LeBaron, 2011) a number of directives aimed at getting the addressee to do a preliminary body movement in order to put their body in a position so that they can perceive it visually (ordinarily glossed as seeing the object). It is proposed that these directives could be called transitional directives and it is discussed how these directives may be a phenomenon in its own terms, differing from other types of recruitment.