Multimodally aligning with projected continuation in Peninsular Spanish

Abstract This article explores resources for multimodally aligning with projected continuation in data from Peninsular Spanish, engaging with method-ological-theoretical frameworks from Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. The article presents a pattern largely representative of a collection of fifteen storytellings: When tellers project continuation (pragmatically, semantically, prosodically, syntactically, gesturally), recipients are silent and embodiedly still, steadily gazing at teller, rarely producing vocal continuers. The Aforementioned recipient behavior appears throughout the data as structurally aligning with the turn-taking system being adjusted to one speaker doing a lengthy turn-at-talk. As pertaining to vocal continuers, the pattern is also representative of a pool of >364 big packages from which the storytellings are collected. One of the rare occasions when vocal continuers are employed in the data from Peninsular Spanish, is in a multimodally restricted participation framework. This study thus invites a multimodal reinterrogation of the roles and frequencies of vocal continuers in the interactional achievement of multi-unit-turns. Alongside work on other languages, however, it also suggests that structural alignment, as a likely universal relational principle, can be language-/culture-specifically routinized.