Description
The communication among animals and human beings has been studied in
many fields of knowledge such as Biology, or, more specifically, on the field of Animal
Communication (BRADBURY; VEHRENCAMP, 2011; KENDRICK et al, 2018), the
Human Health, especially on the fields of Psychiatry and Psychology (BURES et al,
2014; MATCHOCK, 2015) and on Linguistics, both through a cognitivist approach
(ZUBERBÜHLER, 2015) as well as interactional (MONDÉMÉ, 2016; MONDÉMÉ,
2018; TANNEN, 2004). This research is inserted on the scope of this last research
area. Supported by the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Conversation
Analysis this study is dedicated to describing and analyzing moments of coexistence
among human beings and their pets in their environments in which they cohabit. We
seek to: (a) Identify organizational aspects of interactions among human and non human animals, focusing on how these interactions are coconstructed sequentially; (b)
Perform multimodal analysis of interactions among human and non-human animals,
observing the resources used by the participants to reach intersubjectivity; (c) Verify if
multimodal analysis offers resources to reach an understanding of how the interactions
among human and non-human animals are realized. To do so, I resort to three
interactions between humans and their respective pets through the perspective of
Conversations Analysis (SACKS, 1992; SCHEGLOOF, 2007; SACKS, SCHEGLOOF,
JEFFERSON, 1974). The interactions analyzed were recorded in audio and video
format and transcribed according to the conventions of the Jeffersonian transcription
system (BOLDEN; HEPBURN, 2017), for the spoken data, and the multimodal
transcription system developed by Mondada (2016), for the data composed by
embodied actions. The results from the analysis of the data show that: (i) humans and
nonhuman animals engage in activities which require joint attention and are shown to
act reflexively one in relation to the other; (ii) the interactions here analyzed are
organized in sequences, constituted of adjacency pairs occupied by turns-at-talk or
embodied actions; (iii) the alignment/disalignment phenomena are present on the
interactions.
