When Following Should Begin: The Intelligibility of Embodied Instruction as a Unit of Action

Previous conversation-analytic research on action sequences accomplished through embodied conduct has shown that such sequences may proceed according to temporal orders that differ from those of the turn-taking system—an issue discussed under the rubric of multiple temporalities . In line with this analytic orientation, this paper investigates how, in Japanese instructional contexts, instructions and instructed actions are organized as action sequences with their own temporal order. Drawing on a large corpus of naturally occurring everyday Japanese interactions, a collection of instruction sequences was assembled in which instructions were produced through embodied resources and were immediately followed by the recipients’ embodied actions. Conversation analysis revealed that the participants recurrently coupled verbal expression with bodily demonstration—termed an instruction articulation unit —to enable the recipients to (1) recognize an instruction as a coherent unit of action and (2) understand the timing for initiating the instructed action independently of turn-taking organization. Turn-constructional units were also observed as resources for establishing coherence across multiple instruction sequences. On this basis, the analysis explicates how multiple temporalities are systematically interrelated in the constitution of instructional activities.