L'organisation émergente des ressources multimodales dans l’interaction en lingua franca : entre progressivité et intersubjectivité

This paper offers a conversational multimodal approach to professional talk in interaction mobilizing English as a Lingua Franca. On the basis of a series of excerpts taken from a video recorded meeting in which a French and four Chinese partners discuss about the delocalization of a French company in China, the paper shows how the participants mobilize English as a Lingua Franca as a situated resource. More specifically, the paper shows that the use of a lingua franca, along with the use of embodied resources, like gesture, is organized in an incremental and emergent way. In this respect, lingua franca talk is a perspicuous case for developing an emergentist perspective on linguistic and bodily resources in interaction. Moreover, the specific way in which these resources are mobilized shows the participants orientation towards two basic principles of social interaction: intersubjectivity and progressivity. The paper shows how these principles are implemented in the moment by moment emergence of talk and through the situated online 'bricolage' of linguistic and gestural resources.