Time in action

One effect of the way in which human action is constituted and shaped within a rich multimodal ecology of sign systems is that participants orient to multiple orders of temporality simultaneously. Within talk-in-interaction, linguistic structure provides resources that can be used simultaneously to (1) structure time in the world being represented through talk and (2) provide hearers with resources for projecting future events in the current and future interactions. Such structure in the stream of speech is framed by the participants' bodies. Through interactively organized gesture and posture, participants display crucial information about the temporal and sequential organization of their joint participation in the current interaction. This multiplicity of concurrently relevant embodied temporalities extends to the tools and documents used in a scientific work setting such as an archaeological excavation. To uncover a past world archaeologists use tools from a professional past (e. g., the coding sheet of a senior investigator, the history of research encapsulated in the Munsell color chart, etc.) to build a work-relevant future (the records that will form the basis for subsequent analysis). The data for the present analysis consist of videotapes of situated human interaction.