Locating summonses

Esther González-Martínez, Angeliki Balantani

► To cite this version:

Esther González-Martínez, Angeliki Balantani. Locating summonses. Journal of Pragmatics, 2025, 235, pp.254-271. 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.012. hal-04855456

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# Locating summonses

Esther González-Martínez *, Angeliki Balantani

Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, Boulevard de Pérolles 90, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

## ARTICLE INFO

Article history:

Received 20 September 2024
Received in revised form 23 November 2024
Accepted 26 November 2024

Keywords:

Multimodal conversation analysis
Summons-answer sequence
Locating
Hospital staff
Corridor interaction

## ABSTRACT

Summons are a crucial resource for prospective participants attempting to establish contact in the opening phase of an interaction. In conversation analysis, they have been studied predominantly as the first pair part of the summons-answer sequence, functioning as “attention-getting devices.” We show that summons can also be instrumental for achieving a more fundamental task: locating a prospective coparticipant in space. Indeed, coparticipants may rely on summons-answer sequences in order to look for their future interlocutors and identify where they are. Our study focuses on stand-alone first-name summonses in the opening phase of interactions involving a recruiting activity and considers locating the prospective coparticipant and recruitee as a preliminary to it. This article contributes to the understanding of summons and recruitment in face-to-face “on the move” interactions. The data are video recordings of staff corridor interactions in a hospital outpatient clinic in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## 1. Introduction

A hospital is a fluid, time-critical and spatially distributed work environment in which mobility plays a crucial role (Bardram and Bossen, 2005). Clinic staff members regularly walk from one place to another, putting together the ever-changing assemblages of people, information, equipment and places required for their tasks. The process of finding coworkers is a key driver of mobility, since staff conducts interdependent activities that regularly require the contribution and coordination of several professionals (Strauss, 1988). Nevertheless, locating coworkers is a challenge as staff members are continually moving throughout the hospital premises, often away from their preassigned time-space coordinates. This leads to further mobility and the deployment of ordinary summoning and locating practices, as well as dedicated technologies (Fisher and Monahan, 2012; Ullah et al., 2023).

When examining staff corridor interactions in a hospital outpatient clinic, we realized that these were often oriented towards recruiting (Kendrick and Drew, 2016; Floyd et al., 2020; González-Martínez and Drew, 2021) a coworker for the realization of a new practical activity.<fnref n="1" /> In other words, a staff member gets hold of a colleague and enlists them to do something. Moreover, the initial recruiting move (Kendrick, 2020), for instance the request, is often preceded by a summons-answer sequence (Schegoff, 1968). Most often, staff member A calls out to staff member B by their first name and

<footnote>* Corresponding author.</footnote>

<footnote>E-mail addresses: esther.gonzalezmartinez@unifr.ch (E. González-Martínez), abalantani@gmail.com (A. Balantani).</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹ The research project "Requesting in hospital nurses' unscheduled interprofessional interactions" (Swiss National Science Foundation, grant n° 185152) examines four activities - locating the prospective coparticipants, getting their attention, securing availability and sharing background information - that are preliminary to initial recruiting moves, requests for instance. The present article is the first of a series of four, each one concentrating on a preliminary activity. The project uses data collected for two previous projects of the first author and principal investigator: "Mobile and contingent work interactions in the hospital care unit" (Swiss National Science Foundation, grant no. 134875) and "New on the job. Relevance-making and assessment practices of interactional competences in young nurses' hospital telephone calls" (Swiss National Science Foundation, grant no. 136291).</footnote>
B then produces a “go-ahead” response like oui (“yes” in French). In addition to the traditionally studied functions of getting the attention and securing the reciprocity of the prospective interlocutor prior to launching the main activity (Schegoff, 1968), the summons is sometimes instrumental for achieving a more fundamental task: locating the prospective coparticipant and recruitee in space. The sequence unfolds as follows: a staff member utters the first name of a coworker who is nowhere in sight; the aural features of the summons enable the recipient to grasp not only that they are being searched for but also who the person searching for them is and where this person is located. In return, the aural features of the recipient's response allow the summoner not only to know that they have reached their target but also to identify where the person they had been seeking is in space.<fnref n="2" /> If the initial summons is not responded to, the summoner produces subsequent ones, which are prosodically modified, until a response is obtained. The summons-answer sequence thus serves to locate the participants in space but also has identification and recognition functions conducive to the upcoming practical activity, namely the recruitment. The feasibility and efficacy of the locating activity is grounded in distinctive features of the clinic as an interactional work environment, with respect to the staff members: the high perceptibility and accessibility of the coworkers, the high intelligibility of their actions, their relative availability and the fluidity of their interactional opportunities. Concurrent to or following the summons-answer sequence, participants either engage in other preliminary activities, such as checking the coparticipant's availability or providing background information for the upcoming recruitment, or move immediately to introducing the initial recruiting move oriented towards securing the coparticipant's involvement in a new practical activity. As they talk, speakers often walk towards each other, moving close enough to achieve mutual gaze and create a close common interactional space (Mondada, 2009) that they shape according to the emerging recruiting activity.

## 2. Entering into interaction: attention-getting and locating activities

In Goffman's (1963, 1971) classic accounts of entering into interaction, an individual seeing and/or hearing another is traditionally presented as the first step. For instance, someone enters the scanning area of a pedestrian, who glances at them (Goffman, 1971, p. 11-12). For Kendon and Ferber (1973), an individual becomes aware of another's presence by seeing them or hearing their voice, at least one of these being a precondition for interaction. From there, the individual may indicate that they wish to get engaged in interaction, or not, and expect a response. For Goffman (1963), being fully copresent requires each person to perceive and be perceived by the others, through their naked senses, as well as sensing that they are being perceived, which makes close mutual monitoring possible (p. 15-18). In conversation analysis, Schegloff (1979) acknowledges the importance of the pre-beginnings phase, including lookings and body orientations, which sustain seeing and identifying the persons in the scene as well as future interlocutors. Examining telephone calls, Whalen and Zimmerman (1987) include in this phase selecting the future recipient of the call, figuring out how to reach the person and dialing the telephone number.

Since the turn of the century, these foundational insights have inspired a collection of studies seeking to empirically and systematically examine the very first actions leading to the beginning of an interaction and the establishment of mutual perceptibility (see Pillet-Shore, 2018 for an introduction). Analyzing itinerary requests between pedestrians, Mondada (2009) identifies the first action as the inspection of surrounding persons in search of the one appropriate for the projected activity. Mortensen and Hazel (2014) examine how a student approaching a help desk and the staff member behind the counter look at the people in the building's hall, monitor them and distinguish their future interlocutor from among them. Studying the pre-opening phase of casual encounters in public places, De Stefani and Mondada (2018) examine the difference between identifying a potential interactional partner among people one is unacquainted with (through descriptive and categorizing practices suited to the upcoming practical task) and recognizing a person one is acquainted with, with displays of the event being unexpected and the use of categories unrelated to “any specific task at hand” (p. 254). A person trying to talk to a colleague approaches their open office door, becomes visible and freezes to get their attention (Tuncer and Licoppe, 2018). If sitting together in an open space office, the would-be initiator monitors their prospective coparticipant for signs of availability (Salvadori, 2016).

In these studies, the soon-to-be coparticipants are already in each other's physical presence and sight (see also Harjunpää et al., 2018; Kidwell, 2018; Mondada, 2022). In contrast, very little is known about the achievement of searching for and localizing in space a prospective coparticipant who is nowhere in sight: the interactional work that we have grouped under the term “locating activities.” In recent decades, a perspicuous setting for this object of study has been computer-mediated interaction because of both the challenges and possibilities that the new communication technologies represent. Examining videoconferencing in judicial hearings, Licoppe and Dumoulin (2007) document the work involved in making sure that the incipient coparticipants can see and be seen, hear and be heard, and in figuring out who is already in the scene and where they are. Similarly, full copresence is a gradual interactional achievement in video-mediated meetings between surgeons (Mondada, 2015). Even more relevant to us is the study of Licoppe (2009) on people playing a cellphone-based game that shows where in the city the other players may be located. The players

<footnote n="2">² The studied practice is based on the human ability, already active in newborns (Muir and Field, 1979), to locate sources of sound (see Middlebrooks and Green, 1991, for a review). On the related ability to discern the directionality of someone's voice without having visual access to the speaker, see Rossano et al. (2012).</footnote>
engage in “colocalization work” in order to establish coproximity as a basis for entering into interaction (for localization queries during the opening phase of cellphone communication, but after the summons, see Weilenmann, 2003; Arminen, 2006; Licoppe, 2009; Laursen and Szymanski, 2013). Studying a more mundane setting, interactions in cars, Rauniomaa and Haddington (2012) note that although the cellphone may ring, the passengers still need to localize, search for and reach the phone.

Our own study of corridor interactions shows that locating and attention-getting activities can be conflated in a summons-answer sequence as prospective coparticipants set the basis for and enter into interaction. With that in mind, we consider it appropriate to reiterate the basic properties of these sequences identified by Schegloff (1968) and developed ever since in the multimodal and conversation analytic literature; for an up-to-date and comprehensive review, see Eilittä (2024). Traditionally, summonses have been considered devices that are instrumental for getting a coparticipant's attention or mobilizing recipiency. A summons can take several forms, ranging from mechanically and electronically produced signs (like a flashing light, the ringing of a phone or a text notification) to oral and verbal behavior (whistling or uttering the first name of the recipient, for instance) and bodily conduct (such as a tap on the shoulder) (Licoppe, 2010; Gardner, 2015; Kidwell, 2018; Sikveland, 2019; Laurier et al., 2020; Reber and Couper-Kuhlen, 2020). As the first pair part of an adjacency pair, a summons makes an answer - commonly a go-ahead or a blocking response - conditionally relevant, the answer moreover being subject to a constraint of immediate juxtaposition. Another property of summons-answer sequences is their non-terminality: they are preliminary to an activity and prepare the way for it. Being a generic pre-sequence (Schegloff, 2007), it can be followed by many different base sequences, for instance implementing requests. Furthermore, the sequence is nonrepeatable: once a summons has been answered, there is no point in the summoner producing a new one. Nevertheless, in the absence of a response, a summons can be re-issued, often prosodically modified; on this specific point, see for example Aronsson and Cekaite (2011), Kidwell (2013), Salvadori (2016), Sikveland (2019) and Eilittä and Vatanen (2023).

Building on this literature, we have conducted a study on summons-answer sequences as preliminaries to recruiting moves in hospital staff corridor interactions. This study shows that summonses other than “attention-getting devices” (Schegloff, 1968) sometimes work as “locating devices” when looking for and localizing the coparticipant and prospective recruitee in space. We thus expand the present understanding of summonses in face-to-face interaction and contribute to the study of recruiting practices (Kendrick and Drew, 2016) and “on-the-move” interactions (Mondada, 2014).

## 3. Setting, data and analytic approach

Our study on summons-answer sequences preliminary to recruiting moves is based on a corpus composed of 331 h of video recordings of hospital staff corridor interactions (González-Martínez et al., 2017a). The recordings were made in an outpatient clinic of an acute-care hospital in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The clinic provided scheduled and walk-in care in general and orthopedic medicine, including non-life-threatening urgent care. On a regular weekday, the clinic's team was composed of approximately 14 members: a head physician, a head nurse, residents, nurses, nurses' aides, nursing assistants and interns, and a clinic secretary. The clinic occupied a section of the ground floor of the hospital's building, with the rooms connected by a racetrack-forming corridor and a transversal central corridor connecting the two main centers of activity, the Day Hospital Room and the Urgent Care Room. The research team recorded activity in the corridors using a recording set-up composed of four cameras suspended from the ceiling and eight wireless microphones suspended from light fixtures, functioning with no interruptions for seven consecutive days, 12 h per day (see Appendix: Clinic's premises and recording set-up).<fnref n="3" />

### 3.1. Recruiting and locating activities: selected cases

We have selected 66 excerpts of the collected video recordings using the following criteria. 1) Two staff members who were previously apart come together and produce a new segment of talk. 2) There are no greetings or farewells since these are rare between staff members during a workday. 3) One of them becomes a recruiter and the other a recruitee (Kendrick, 2020). 4) Talk is initiated by the soon-to-be recruiter. 5) Recruitment is the first and main order of business. 6) When successful, recruitment equates to the recruitee getting involved in an immediate or subsequent new practical activity (in contrast to just providing a verbal response), whether or not this was projected by the initial recruiting move.

The initial recruiting move (Kendrick, 2020) corresponds to the first utterance, or bodily action, attempting to enlist the prospective recruitee in the realization of a new practical activity or providing them with an opportunity to get involved (see also Floyd et al., 2020). In the selected excerpts, the initial recruiting move is often preceded by verbal and/or bodily activities that we consider preliminaries to it. These are mainly oriented towards locating the prospective recruitee, getting their attention, checking their availability and providing background information relevant to the upcoming recruitment. The

<footnote n="3">³ The research protocol was accepted by the hospital's board of directors and the clinic staff gave voluntary informed consent for research participation, including the reproduction of still images drawn from the recordings for publication purposes. Patients and individuals external to the clinic were informed by written and oral means of the research being carried out in the clinic but, following the research protocol, the research team used footage only of the clinic personnel and other predetermined members of the hospital staff. Personal data, including the names of the persons concerned, was replaced by fictitious data.</footnote>
participants produce a verbal summons-answer sequence in the opening of their interaction in 46 cases out of 66, and these form the collection of the present study. In most of the cases, the verbal summons is a standalone first name produced in full form.<fnref n="4" /> For this article, we have focused in particular on 10 excerpts featuring first-name “locating summonses,” transcribed following the conventions of Jefferson (2004) for talk and Mondada (2019) for bodily conduct.<fnref n="5" /> Relying on multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2014), we examine how talk combined with gaze, gestures and walking practices contribute to the situated achievement of an activity preliminary to the initial recruiting move: looking for and localizing in space the prospective coparticipants, the soon-to-be recruiter and recruitee.

## 3.2. The clinic as an interactional environment and the scene of locating activities

The clinic has several distinctive features as an interactional environment for staff members. The first is high percep-
tibility of the coworkers and their actions. Indeed, the staff members perform their activities in a spatially distributed
workplace formed of rooms connected by corridors and communicating doors, with most of the doors kept open and only
some specific worksites, like occupied patient beds or consultation rooms, occasionally concealed from view. Moreover,
sound travels very easily in the absence of obstacles. The clinic is also a highly intelligible interactional environment for the
staff members, who can easily make sense of what they can see and hear. Indeed, the staff is formed of a small group of
regular coworkers who know each other well, are familiar with the clinic's routine activities and sustain continuous
awareness of its functioning through monitoring and displaying practices (González-Martínez et al., 2017b). A third feature
is that accessibility between coworkers is very high since they not only work in the same space but also readily address each
other. Indeed, they exchange greetings in the morning and remain open to further interaction throughout the rest of the
day, sustaining a pseudo-continuing state of incipient talk (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Schegloff, 2007). By "pseudo," we
mean that they are not continuously copresent in the same confined space, like car passengers, but are often within each
other's sight and/or hearing range. A fourth feature characterizing this environment is fluidity. The staff members constantly
circulate throughout the clinic, putting together the everchanging assemblages of people, information, equipment and
places needed to make progress in their activities. As a result, a staff member might have only a very brief window of
opportunity to see and access a specific coworker. Staff members therefore engage in interaction whenever and wherever
possible and in all types of spatial configurations, face-to-face, passing by, merging, side-by-side or following (González-
Martínez et al., 2016). A final feature is availability to engage in interaction and new activities, and this availability is
often offered, since staff members are part of a team sharing common objectives, but cannot be taken for granted, since
each member has their own responsibilities, commitments and time pressures.

All in all, these features set the scene for frequent and expeditious locating activities relying on direct communication. Locating consists of looking for and identifying where a prospective coparticipant is in space. Sometimes a staff member A might assume that a coworker B is in the clinic even if they are not perceptible, visually or audibly, through the naked senses. In other cases, the coworker's presence in the clinic can be inferred by aural means but the exact location in the clinic may remain uncertain. In both cases, A may engage in a searching activity involving visual checks while travelling through the corridors or entering the rooms to inspect them (González-Martínez et al., 2017b). The activity can also involve paying attention to the acoustic environment to pick up aural cues as to the sought-after person's position in space. Sometimes locating entails recruiting third parties to help. And it can also involve talking to the coworker, either to summon them or ask them about their whereabouts as in the cases considered in our study.

# 4. Analysis

This article focuses on locating activities, preliminary to initial recruiting moves, involving the production of a stand-
alone first-name summons. We will show that the summons serves as a locating device in addition to the traditionally
studied attention-getting function. In Section 4.1, we will first examine a contrast case, Excerpt 1, in which the summons
is instrumental in getting the recipient's attention after she has already been located by the summoner. We will then
examine Excerpt 2, in which the summonses, in addition to securing recipiency, function at a more basic level: they are
instrumental in the summoner's search for and identification of where in space the prospective interlocutor is; in this
sense, they are “locating summonses.” In Section 4.2, we will examine three additional cases of summonses functioning as
locating devices. In the studied cases, the summons-answer sequence is sometimes followed by subsequent preliminary
activities, which we will only mention briefly, before the uttering of the initial recruiting move, which we will show in the
transcript but not analyze in detail.

<footnote n="4">⁴ Following are some exceptions: the summons is a diminutive of the summoned person's first name; the first-name summons is prefaced by “ah” and/or “um”; the summoner says the first name of the summoned party twice, in rapid succession, and in the same turn-at-talk; the summons is an apology term followed by the recipient's first name; a nurse asks someone, who is not visible, where they are and then calls them by their first name; an aide saying “um pf-” while walking towards a nurse and looking at her functions as a summons that secures the nurse's attention.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Most of the summons-answers sequences in the 46 selected cases indeed do not have a locating function but are predominantly oriented towards, as traditionally studied, securing attention, recipiency and availability. We established some distinctions between these summonses, identifying, for instance, “halting” and “calling-out” summonses oriented towards getting the attention of a recipient walking away from the summoner.</footnote>
4.1. "Attention-getting" versus "Locating" summonses

At the beginning of Excerpt 1 (Fig. 1), Estelle (Est in the transcript), a clinic nurse, is talking to a patient in the Day Hospital Room (henceforth DHR) (line 2) while walking towards the curtain separating the central section of the room from the entrance section. She goes through the opening in the curtain and steps into the entrance section (3, img. 1.1).<fnref n="6" /> As she turns to her right, Jonas (Jon), an attending physician who is walking from the Break Room (henceforth BR), goes past the DHR, looking in the direction of the Urgent Care Room (henceforth UCR). Estelle looks towards him for a fraction of a second, thus locating him in space (3, img. 1.2), and then looks ahead of her.

Excerpt 1: 205_20B_024757

1 (1.4)

2 Est: ↑au début y a rien à camoufler €c'(h)est sûr ↑hehehe€
at the beginning there is nothing to disguise it is for sure
hehehe
est €walks in central section
of DHR€

3 €(0.2)# + (0.1) $(0.4)# + (0.2) *(0.1)$
€walks into DHR's entrance section--->>1.5
est +looks towards Jon+looks ahead--->
jon $walks from BR towards UCR$
jon *looks towards Est--->>
fig #img.1.1
fig #img.1.2

4 Jon: -> $es#↑TE+LLE
Estelle
jon $turns around--->
est --->+looks towards Jon--->
fig #img.1.3

5 (0.2)€
est --->€

6 Est: €↑oui::$#=
yes
est €walks towards Jon--->
jon --->$
fig #img.1.4

7 Jon: =$elle a ↑fini sa transfusion madame:+ du↑pont?€
she has finished her transfusion Ms. Dupont
jon $steps back, adopts a static position--->>
est --->+
est --->€

8 Est: €bien.
good
est €adopts a static position--->>

9 (0.2)

10 Jon: donc si tu **peux** on la: (.) déperfuse et puis:
so if you can one/we will disconnect her and then

11 on va lancer le plâtre,
one/we will begin the plaster

12 (0.7)

13 Est: °très bien°
very good

As Jonas approached the DHR through Corridor C, he was able to hear Estelle jokingly talking - her utterance in line 2 is tinted with laughter-inside the DHR. He has thus been able to locate her in the clinic premises and even infer her degree of availability for engaging in interaction, conversation and a new practical action with him. As he is about to enter Corridor B, he turns his head towards the DHR, as if realizing on the spot the advantage of talking to Estelle (3), and looks at her. Estelle has already diverted her

<footnote n="6">⁶ Beneath the original French talk, we provide an English translation that is as natural as possible while still reproducing the structure of the French utterance. We supplement each excerpt's transcript with screenshots from the corresponding video clip and add annotations at the points in the transcript where the participants perform the actions shown in the images. Thereafter, in the analysis section, the numbers in parentheses refer to the lines of the excerpt.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1. Estelle and Jonas in the area of the Day Hospital entrance and Corridor B. View from camera 2.</figcaption></figure>

attention from him but Jonas is thus able to confirm her location in the DHR. With his head turned towards Estelle, Jonas addresses her with a first-name summons uttered with medial rising intonation (4). The stand-alone summons is the first pair part of a sequence in which Jonas, having previously located Estelle, can now take action to get her attention and engage her in interaction and conversation. While he is uttering the summons, he turns his body towards Estelle (4, img. 1.3). Once she hears the summons, Estelle abandons her trajectory, looks at Jonas and starts walking towards him. She then produces a go-ahead response with an elongated “yes” token (6, img. 1.4). Estelle thus displays recipiency of the summons and gives Jonas the green light to proceed with the activity that the generic summons foreshadows. A preliminary attention-getting activity has thus been produced through a summons-answer sequence. Immediately following the go-ahead response, Jonas takes a step back and adopts a static position<fnref n="7" /> as he introduces a second activity preliminary to the upcoming recruiting move, which consists of soliciting and sharing background information that is relevant to it: he requests confirmation that a patient’s treatment is complete (7).<fnref n="8" /> By now, Jonas and Estelle have come to a face-to-face spatial configuration. Following Estelle’s affirmative response (8), Jonas produces the initial recruiting move: he proposes an action that can be taken next and is conditional on Estelle’s own capacities (see Taleghani-Nikazam, 2006 on contingent requests); namely, to prepare the aforementioned patient for plaster (10-11), which Estelle agrees to (13).

In this excerpt, both participants spot their counterparts by aural and/or visual means before engaging in talk. The summons-answer sequence is produced afterwards and serves to solicit and display attention and availability to engage in interaction, conversation and an as-yet-unspecified new project, which corresponds to the functions traditionally examined in the literature (Schegloff, 1968, 2007).

We will now examine an excerpt in which, unlike in Excerpt 1, the summons-answer sequence is instrumental in a summoner's search for and localizing of their prospective coparticipant in space. Excerpt 2 (Fig. 2) involves Mae, a clinic nurse, who goes out of the UCR calling out to Cybele (Cyb) (2), a rotating aide, who turns out to be in the Specialist Room (henceforth SPR) in Corridor A. As she reaches the UCR entrance, Mae looks first towards the Plaster Room (henceforth PR) and then towards the SPR (3).

Excerpt 2: 616_22B_015038

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Through body behavior, the participants have come to an understanding that it is Estelle who should do the walking. Estelle thus moves towards Jonas, an action that he encourages by remaining stationary himself. Setting the spatial scene in which the recruitment is going to take place is another aspect of the activity, but due to space limitations, we can only draw the reader's attention to it in this article.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Jonas’ utterance in line 7 could also be an informing, given its syntax and the form of Estelle’s response (8): the doctor could be telling the nurse that the transfusion is complete. The final rising intonation does not suffice to discriminate with certainty between the two options. We nevertheless consider that the utterance conveys a question, since Estelle has been with the patient up to this point and the doctor has not.</footnote>
3
mae
mae
fig
fig
(2.1) +(0.4)+€# (0.3)#
+looks towards PR+looks towards SPR--->
--->$adopts a static position--->
#img.2.2
#img.2.3

4 Mae: -> CY↑BEle?
Cybele

5
(1.4)

6 Cyb: >ou↑ais<
yeh

7
mae
cyb
cyb
mae
fig
(1.3)+ $*(0.3)€# (0.2)
--->+looks towards Cybele--->1.12
$walks from SPR towards UCR/Mae--->
*looks towards Mae--->1.12
--->$turns towards UCR--->1.12
#img.2.4

8 Mae: ©ah tu- ↑t'es occupée avec °di[no?° ] ah you you are busy with dino
mae ©points towards SPR--->

9 Cyb: [±°non.±] je je l'aidais
no I I was helping him
cyb
±shakes head±

10 (>ben<)$ j'no↑tais. (0.2)© pa'ce °qu'elle fait° un well I was writing down because she does a

cyb --->$adopts a static position--->1.12
mae --->$points towards UCR--->1.12
cyb °points towards SPR°

11 p'tit pansement° °° au ( )°°
little bandage at the

12 ((9 lines omitted))

13 Mae: €$hazel m'a deman- i' m'a d'mandé si tu
Hazel has ask- me he has asked me if you

mae €walks towards UCR--->>

cyb $walks towards UCR--->>

14 pouvais euh m'installer pis (prendre déjà les)
could um prepare me then take already the

15 (pansements)
bandages

16 (0.3)

17 Cyb: >oui<
yes

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2. Mae and Cybele in the area of the Urgent Care Room entrance and Corridor A. View from camera 4, except for 2.4, which is the view from camera 3.</figcaption></figure>
At the beginning of Excerpt 2, Mae is walking down the UCR corridor, heading towards the entrance (1). As she walks, she summons Cybele, who is, at this point, nowhere in sight (2, img. 2.1). Mae utters a stand-alone first-name summons with medial rising intonation in a rather loud voice, as if aware that her location in the UCR corridor reduces the chances of being heard by Cybele. The summons is the first pair part of an adjacency pair sequence, which on the basis of the property of conditional relevance requires a response next (Schegloff, 1968). This initial summons is nevertheless not responded to, which constitutes a noticeable absence. In this absence of a response, Mae keeps moving forward, during a lapse of 2.8 s, towards the exit of the UCR (3). Once there, she first looks to her left (3, img. 2.2), towards the PR, stops and then looks to her right (3, img. 2.3), towards the SPR. At this point, Mae is visibly looking for Cybele, trying to identify where in the clinic she is located. Having reached the intersection between Corridors A and B, Mae calls out to Cybele again (4). She produces a second stand-alone first-name summons, once again uttering it with rising medial intonation and a rather loud voice. In this excerpt, Mae thus orients not only her body and gaze, but also the sound of her voice, in different directions (in front of her, then to the left and finally to the right) as she looks for and calls out to Cybele.<fnref n="9" /> Mae's location at the UCR's entrance may have been beneficial for the audibility and intelligibility of the second summons, which, after a silence, receives a go-ahead response from Cybele (6). As she hears the response, Mae subtly reorients her gaze and the upper part of her body towards the SPR (7). The aide then goes out of it, her head already oriented in Mae's direction, and walks towards her (7, img. 2.4). Her head position displays that the aural features of the summons have allowed Cybele to locate the person, Mae, who is looking for her. Once Cybele goes out of the SPR, Mae reorients her body towards the UCR. The preliminary locating activity is thus concluded and a close face-to-face interactional configuration is about to be established. As Cybele approaches her, Mae introduces a second preliminary activity: checking Cybele's availability (8). Cybele responds, implying readiness to take on a new task (9-11). Following some backgrounding information (not reproduced in the transcript), Mae produces the initial recruiting move (13-14): she reports the request of a third party addressed to Cybele and having Mae as a beneficiary: to get some patients ready for her.

In contrast to Excerpt 1, the participants here are located far apart from each other, with no visual or aural accessibility prior to the summons. Hence, the prospective recruiter has to first localize the prospective recruitee in space. She engages in a series of locating practices: A summons B in a loud voice, moves towards a perspicuous place for locating B and, making herself locatable, engages in a visual search, and then, in the absence of a response, repeats the summons. The multimodal production of the summons-answer sequence is instrumental in the process of finding a coworker, making the location of each participant known to each other, securing mutual attention and availability for interaction and conversation, and setting the participants on their way towards a common interactional space and a recruiting activity.

## 4.2. *A gradual, multimodal and collaborative locating activity*

In this section, we will examine three additional cases of “locating summonses” in which the practices we have just presented are at work. We will focus on three features of the sequence: the activity is produced gradually, multimodally and collaboratively. In Excerpt 3 (Fig. 3), Hazel (Haz), a nurse, is walking from Reception towards the intersection of Corridors C and B. When still in Corridor C, off-camera, she summons Ophelia (Oph), a nurse aide, who turns out to be inside the DHR (1).

### Excerpt 3: 520_22A_035427

1 Haz: -> OpheLI↑A?

Ophelia

2 (0.6) €+(1.0)# (0.3)

haz €walks from Reception towards UCR--->

haz +looks towards DHR+looks ahead--->

fig #img.3.1

3 Oph: >oui<€

yes

haz --->€

4 €(0.5)€+# (0.4)# (1.0)#

haz €turns around€walks towards DHR--->

haz --->+looks towards DHR---->1.11

fig #img.3.2

fig #img.3.3

fig #img.3.4

<footnote n="9">⁹ Among other insightful comments, one of the anonymous reviewers surmised that successive locating summonses would be produced with different head orientations, thus varying their areas of audibility. This proved to be the case in three out of the four excerpts of successive locating summonses in our collection. The fourth case presents limited evidence due to the restricted visibility of the summoner.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Hazel and Ophelia in the area of the Day Hospital entrance and Corridor C. View from camera 2, except for 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, which are from camera 4.</figcaption></figure>

At the beginning of Excerpt 3, Hazel calls out to Ophelia using a stand-alone first-name summons uttered in a rather loud voice and with rising final intonation (1). The aural features of the summons correspond to the fact that Hazel is still in Corridor C, away from the clinic's main centers of activity, with Ophelia nowhere in sight. Then, Hazel turns to enter Corridor
B, thus orienting in the direction of the UCR, towards which she walks at a rather fast pace. She briefly looks inside the DHR, which may be part of the activity of searching for Ophelia, but keeps moving in the opposite direction (2, img. 3.1), where she has some business to do (namely, getting a gown for the patient she is taking care of). Following a silence, Ophelia responds verbally to the summons, producing a “yes” token (3). This is a go-ahead response that marks receipt of the summons and availability to hear whatever Hazel may have to say next. The aural features of Ophelia's response are a resource for Hazel to use to locate her inside the DHR. During the 1.9-s silence that follows, Hazel suspends her trajectory towards the UCR, turns around and walks towards the DHR, looking inside of it (4, img. 3.2–3.4). Ophelia is not yet visible to Hazel since the nurse is still in Corridor B and the DHR is a room with several sections divided by curtains. Ophelia is aware that someone is outside looking for her, and she has probably recognized Hazel from her voice. Nevertheless, she has not yet seen Hazel seeing her, nor has the nurse spoken again since the completion of the summons-answer sequence, which goes against the property of its nonterminality (Schegloff, 1968). In line 5, Ophelia therefore again indicates her availability to engage in interaction and conversation, and directs Hazel towards her with a cue about her location (“I’m there”). The implicitness of the locational pro- term (Schegloff, 1972) and the specific use of the deictic “there” (*là*) versus “here” (*ici*) convey that Ophelia’s location is inferable and reachable for Hazel, who is to do the walking, even if not at hand or visible right away. Guided solely by the sound of Ophelia’s voice, Hazel may come to realize, and see, where Ophelia is as she makes her way towards the DHR entrance. Indeed, Hazel, who was up to this point visually searching inside the DHR, produces a smile of recognition (6, img. 3.5) as she probably establishes eye contact with Ophelia. Next, she checks Ophelia’s availability for a new task that will be to Hazel’s benefit (7–8), which is an additional activity preliminary to the initial recruiting move. Ophelia confirms (9) and Hazel stops and awaits Ophelia outside the entrance of the DHR (10, img. 3.6). After a few seconds, as Ophelia approaches, Hazel first informs her of a patient requiring Hazel’s attention (11), which is another activity (namely providing background information) preliminary to the initial recruiting move that she produces next. With an impersonal deontic statement (Rossi and Zinken, 2016), she asserts that an ECG should be done, to her benefit, on the patient, implying that the task falls to Ophelia.<fnref n="10" /> The issuing of the recruiting utterance corresponds to the moment Ophelia comes out of the DHR and joins Hazel in Corridor C (12, img. 3.7), and both establish a close common interactional space suited to the activity of the nurse instructing the aide.

In Excerpt 3, like in the previous excerpt, the prospective recruiter has not localized the prospective recruitee by aural or visual means prior to the summons. She produces the summons as she approaches the clinic's central section and keeps moving ahead. In contrast to the previous excerpt, in Excerpt 3 the recipient produces a go-ahead response following the first summons. This is sufficient for the summoner to reorient towards the room where the summoned party is located but, in order to achieve the preliminary, an additional localization cue is volunteered. The excerpt underscores the fact that locating is a gradual, collaborative and multimodal undertaking in which participants make themselves mutually apparent, moving forward simultaneously on different fronts: locating in space aurally, establishing visual contact and approaching.

In Excerpt 4 (Fig. 4), the summons is produced three times and the answer to it is insufficient to localize the summoned person in space. Contrary to Excerpt 3, here additional localization cues are not volunteered but requested by the summoner. Suzi (Suz), a clinic nurse, is looking for Estelle (Est), another clinic nurse, who happened to be inside the Plaster Room (henceforth PR). The excerpt includes in-passing interaction that Suzi has with Justa, an aide, and Jonas, a physician, that we have not reproduced in the transcript due to space constraints

Excerpt 4: 107_20A_022806

1 €(1.2)€ (1.4)

suz €walks from UCR towards DHR€goes into DHR--->

2 Suz: -> es↑telle?

Estelle

3 (1.0)€ +(1.1)# (1.2)€# (1.1)#+

-->€walks from DHR towards Reception€turns around---->1.4

suz +looks towards DHR+towards Reception+towards BR-->1.4

fig #img.4.1

fig #img.4.2

fig #img.4.3

4 ((10 lines omitted))

5 Suz: -> +ES↑TELLE?#

Estelle

suz +looks towards UCR--->

fig #img.4.4

6 (0.7)+ (2.3)

suz --->+looks towards BR--->

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ In line 12, we use the auxiliary verb “should” to translate *il faudrait* to convey obligation instead of necessity (Rossi and Zinken, 2016), since Hazel could have expressed necessity with an *il est nécessaire* (“it is necessary”) or *j’ai besoin* (“I need”) statement.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4. Suzi and Justa in the area of the Day Hospital entrance and Corridor C. View from camera 2.</figcaption></figure>
At the beginning of Excerpt 4, Suzi walks from the UCR to the DHR. Once inside it, off camera, she produces a stand-alone first-name summons with medial rising intonation, calling out to Estelle (2). The room is divided into several sections with curtains and, with the volume of her voice, Suzi orients to the fact that had Estelle been somewhere there, she could have heard her. However, the summons does not trigger any response from Estelle and Suzi, still inspecting the DHR visually, turns around and goes out (3, img. 4.1). She then takes some steps towards Reception and orients her gaze first in its di- rection (3, img. 4.2) and then to the BR (3, img. 4.3), visibly inspecting her surroundings; she then talks to Justa, who is passing by (4, lines omitted). Afterwards, as Suzi is oriented towards the UCR, she again calls out to Estelle using a stand- alone first-name summons with rising intonation, this time uttered in a loud voice (5, img. 4.4). Here, the summons is adapted to the fact that Estelle has not responded to the first summons and could be located anywhere in a farther and larger area than first expected. As in Excerpt 2, the summoner here is varying the orientation of her body, gaze and voice, and – interrelatedly - the acoustic features of the summonses, while trying to localize the missing coworker. Nevertheless, the second summons, like the first one, is not followed by any response from Estelle. Suzi again inspects her surroundings, orienting her gaze towards the BR, and summons Estelle for the third time, again in a loud voice suited to the assumption of a distant location (7, img. 4.5).

After a gap of 1.7 s, Estelle finally responds to this summons with a go-ahead (“yes,” 9) produced with a volume appropriate for a nearby interlocutor. Nevertheless, Suzi, located far away and in a noisy environment (loud talk in the DHR and a banging door), cannot hear it. Indeed, she does not acknowledge Estelle’s response and looks left towards Reception and right to the BR again (10, img. 4.6–4.7). Since from this position the search activity has been fruitless, she begins to walk in the direction of the UCR. At this point, after a gap of 3.6 s, and greetings between Suzi and Jonas (11, lines omitted), Estelle repeats her answer to the summons with a slightly prolonged “yes” (12) with which she reiterates her availability for interaction and conversation, and conveys her understanding that the summons foreshadowed more to come from the speaker. Like in Excerpt 3, here the aural features of the go-ahead response are enough to identify the speaker and place her in a specific area of the clinic, on the UCR side, to which Suzi was heading anyway, but insufficient to localize her exact position in space. In contrast to the previous excerpt, here the summoner herself asks for the exact location (14), which Estelle provides in line 16. Estelle orients to the fact that the deictic “there” is, in this case, insufficient and should be followed by a nominal reference of the location. Indeed, in this excerpt, both speakers seem not to know exactly where the person they are talking with is, which limits the possibility of assuming that Estelle’s location is inferable and reachable by Suzi. In contrast to Excerpt 3, Estelle here cannot consider that Suzi will soon see her should she keep moving forward guided solely by her voice. As in the previous excerpt, the person providing the localization cue conveys, through the specific use of the locational pro-term “there,” that it is up to the summoner to do the walking to come and find her. In the midst of Estelle’s utterance, Suzi swiftly shifts her gaze to her right, the direction that the sound of Estelle’s voice is coming from (16, img. 4.8), sees Estelle heading to the BR and starts walking towards her. She marks realization of Estelle’s location (“ah”), announces her immediate arrival (“I am there”) and commands her not to move (18). Since Suzi has now localized Estelle, the deictic “there” can have a common referent for them. Later on, as Suzi is about to reach Estelle, she extends her right arm towards her, the palm of her hand facing up, silently asking her for the clinic’s phone back, which is the initial recruiting move (19).

This excerpt underscores the fact that the locating activity can expand into a long sequence depending on contingencies such as the distance between the participants, their reciprocal (in)visibility, background noise and intersecting interactions. The parties take these factors into consideration when producing the summons and the response, at the risk of otherwise not being heard or understood.

An additional aspect of the locating activity’s collaborative dimension is that it can involve a third party. In Excerpt 5 (Fig. 5), Ana, a nurse, is walking from Reception towards the DHR pushing a wheelchair. Hazel (Haz), the clinic nurse in the third excerpt, is currently talking to Cybele, a rotating aide, and some other coworkers in the BR. As Ana is about to reach the entrance of the DHR, she engages in visual searching (2, img. 1.1), goes in and summons Hazel (5).

Excerpt 5: 1225_25B_034407

1. €®+(0.8)
   ana €walks from Reception towards DHR--->
   ana ®pushes a wheelchair--->
   ana +looks towards DHR--->

2 Haz: attendez®# ( )
     wait
   ana --->®
   fig #img.5.1

3. (0.2)€ (0.7)
   ana --->€goes into DHR--->

4 Haz: (tu l'as [déjà])
     you have it already
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5. Ana in the area of the Day Hospital entrance and Corridor C. View from camera 2.</figcaption></figure>

In Excerpt 5, Ana moves forward with the locating activity on two fronts. With entering the DHR and looking inside, she checks if Hazel is there (5, img. 5.2). Simultaneously, she calls out to her with a summons in a rather loud volume that can be heard in other parts of the clinic as well (5). In this excerpt, the curtains inside the DHR are apparently all open, since Ana can
tell from the entrance area, at a glance, that Hazel is not there. Following the summons, she turns around and goes out of the DHR, thus directing her steps towards a more perspicuous place for the locating activity (7, img. 5.3). Indeed, instead of a response from Hazel coming from inside the DHR, what she can hear is Hazel and Cybele, in the BR, talking about the latter going somewhere.

Next, Cybele goes out of the BR and comes into the view of Ana, who by now is standing in front of the DHR and turned in her direction, ready to move away with the wheelchair (12, img. 5.4). Ana asks Cybele where Hazel is (12), which conveys that she is looking for her and that her presence is required then and there. After a gap of 0.7 s, a response is produced, not by Cybele, the addressed recipient, but by Hazel, the person referred to (14). In a loud volume, she utters “I’m there” twice, thereby providing an aural cue of her location and treating it as inferable for Ana, even if not visible. The multiple saying (Stivers, 2004) provides reassurance about her availability for whatever plans might have triggered the summons and about her eagerness to herself undertake the walking that may be necessary; Ana persisting in her summoning—locating activity is thus treated as unnecessary. Ana is therefore brought to attempt an account of it (“because,” 16) before issuing the initial recruiting utterance: a “there is X” statement functioning as a nudge (González-Martínez, 2023) for Hazel to take action; namely, to take care of a waiting patient (16).

The last excerpt of this analytic section confirms and underscores several aspects of the locating activity. The participant doing the searching can move it forward on more than one track simultaneously, visually searching in one direction and also producing a summons that can be heard farther away. In the absence of a response to the summons, background noise can be indicative of the location to be determined. What is more, the summoner can engage in an enquiry about the whereabouts of the sought-after person that can also convey that these are somehow inapposite for the practical activity that the summons forecasts. Third parties can function both as addressed recipients of these double-barreled utterances (Schegloff, 2007) and as deflection points from which they will reach the intended recipient and the mentioned missing person.

## 5. Discussion and conclusion

This study confirms that summons-answer sequences are instrumental in coparticipants establishing copresence and opening a new episode of talk (Schegloff, 2007). The summons solicits attention and availability for interaction, conversation and an as-yet unspecified new practical activity (Schegloff, 2007), even if the summoner may bodily signify what it entails and/or the summoned person can, at the time of their response, display understanding of it. A summoner who relies on a stand-alone first-name summons favors “minimized” and “recognitional” reference forms when addressing the prospective recipient (Sacks and Schegloff, 1979). Characterized by brevity, summonses and responses bear witness to the fact that they are prerequisites to be met before a longer piece of talk can be produced. Summons are re-issued if a response is absent but are prosodically modified (Salvadori, 2016; Sikveland, 2019; Eilittä and Vatanen, 2023). All in all, the study confirms the properties of conditional relevance and immediate juxtaposition of the response, and the non-repeatability and non-terminality of the sequence (Schegloff, 1968).

This article has identified a blind spot in the conversational and multimodal analytic literature: the interactional achievement of looking for and localizing in space prospective coparticipants who are nowhere in sight: namely, the study of “locating activities.” Related to this, the article’s major contribution is to show that summonses are sometimes not only “attention-getting devices” but also “locating devices.” We argue for analytically disentangling these two functions even if, empirically speaking, the same summons may serve both purposes at the same time. Before would-be coparticipant A can call out to someone, they have to have an idea as to whether and where prospective coparticipant B can be found. With its aural features, the locating summons gives away the summoner’s location for the benefit of the summoned person. And when the summoned person replies, they give away their location in return. Conjointly, the summoner and the summoned person both give away who they are: they are identified by the sound of their voices, the first-name summons and the way it is uttered, the fact that the summoned party responds to it and the way they do this (see Schegloff, 1986 on “signature” response tokens to a summons) but also by the fact that the summoner moves ahead with the encounter once the summoned person, who has been called by their first name, has answered. When children are summoned by their caregivers (Aronsson and Cekaite, 2011; Kidwell, 2013), something that is thus at stake is the mutual identification and recognition of the parties, as this is conducive to the subsequent introduction of distinct activities, namely directives and requests, which the identities of the partners and the acoustic features of the summons may foreshadow. A similar mechanism seems to be at play in the staff’s corridor interactions.

We have described a series of practices related to the studied locating activity. The production of the summons is aurally adapted to the presumed location of the summoned person. In the absence of a response, the summons can be re-iterated from a place and/or with a voice orientation more perspicuous for the locating. The summons can also be produced at an increased volume (Aronsson and Cekaite, 2011; Kidwell, 2013; Sikveland, 2019), which expands its space of aural detection, heightens its chances of being heard and emphasizes its relevance. The participants engage in colocalization work and incrementally achieve coproximity (Licoppe, 2009). A competence of the prospective coparticipants is being able to hear a sound as a “located sound” coming from a specific place and source. The full appearance of the parties is achieved gradually, most commonly by aural means and later by visual means (Licoppe and Dumoulin, 2007; Mondada, 2015). Finally, the locating activity is a joint undertaking in which both participants can provide unsolicited additional localization cues and third parties may become involved.
This study contributes to the literature on entering into interaction and beginning talking (Pillet-Shore, 2018), but unlike most studies, it examines a situation in which the prospective coparticipant is nowhere in sight. While spotting the prospective interlocutor and getting their attention have traditionally been described as separate moments in an interaction, belonging respectively to the pre-opening and opening phases (see for instance Mondada, 2009), in the cases discussed in this paper the summons simultaneously fulfills the functions of locating the prospective coparticipant and getting their attention. Moreover, we have studied this type of summons in distributed workspaces in which the issue of locating colleagues is paramount and there are no pre-established places for finding them, compared to the literature on summons between coworkers in open-space offices (Salvadori, 2016) and at the entrance of office doors (Tuncer and Licoppe, 2018). This article also contributes to the study of preliminaries to recruiting activities. Kendrick (2021) shows that attending, monitoring and approaching are sometimes preliminaries to recruiting practices. We have identified an even earlier move, namely “locating” the prospective interlocutor and recruitee. The summoner prepares the way for the launching of the main activity, which is not likely to occur if the prospective recruitee is nowhere in sight or there is no one to talk to in the first place.

This study addresses a basic practical problem in the hospital world that has led to the development of media technologies, from pagers to Bluetooth badges and indoor location-tracking systems designed for localizing and contacting staff members (Fisher and Monahan, 2012; Ullah et al.). This article shows the routine interactional work involved in doing this in the spatially distributed workspace of a hospital clinic in which the staff members do not stay at pre-established workstations but move constantly from one room to another, carrying out closely interdependent activities that require everchanging configurations of people, information, equipment and places (Bardram and Bossen, 2005). We have presented the main features of this interactional environment for staff members, such as high perceptibility, intelligibility, fluidity and accessibility, and relative availability. Besides their basic function, “locating activities” are instrumental in interactionally achieving the team, membership and reciprocal obligations. These include the expectation of immediately responding “ready for action” to the call of a colleague in a close-knit nursing team, which is also achieved by the use of first names as summonses, and the act of producing them and responding to them in the absence of copresence, in the middle of the corridors, in a loud voice, while engaging in approaching trajectories. In this respect, summonses act not only as methods for securing involvement in an upcoming course of action, but also as ordinary methods of doing teamwork and achieving “doing being a team.” The article shows “real-time organization in action” by way of a situated, sequential, interactional and multimodal activity (Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007). We thus argue that focusing on single actions – summonses and their answers – is congruent with the investigation of social organizational problems and their practical solutions (Kendrick, 2024). All in all, this article shows that locating summons-answer sequences constitute an interactional resource for coparticipants to bypass the complexity introduced by the physical environment in which they work and to cope with the constraints of the clinical activities they carry out.

**CRediT authorship contribution statement**

**Esther González-Martínez:** Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization.
**Angeliki Balantani:** Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Validation, Formal analysis, Data curation.

**Data statement**

Due to the sensitive nature of the data, participants were assured that the raw data would remain confidential and would not be shared.

**Funding**

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 185152). The sources of funding played no role in the design or implementation of the study; in the collection, analysis or interpretation of the data; in the preparation, review or approval of the manuscript; or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

**Declaration of competing interest**

None.

**Acknowledgements**

Together with Bastian Taverney, Esther González-Martínez prepared a preliminary data analysis that was presented in several data sessions and papers at the University of Fribourg, University of Neuchâtel and University of Oulu and at the 2021 International Pragmatics Association conference; she thanks the participants for their constructive comments as well as Paul Drew (University of York), partner of the research project, for the collaboration. The authors thank Elisabeth Lyman for her editing of the present article and the two anonymous reviewers for their appreciative and insightful comments.
# APPENDIX

## Clinic premises and recording set-up

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 6.** Clinic premises and recording set-up. The triangles represent the video cameras, the dots the wireless microphones, and the striped rectangle the reception/mixing/editing station. The area covered by the video cameras is represented in gray. Corridor A is 27.40 m long, Corridor B (the section between Corridors A and C) 4.16 m long, and Corridor C 31.50 m long (González-Martínez et al., 2017a).</figcaption></figure>

## Data availability

The authors do not have permission to share raw data.

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**Esther González-Martínez** is Full Professor of Sociology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In her research, she adopts an ethnomethodological perspective and relies on conversation and multimodal analysis, supplemented by ethnographic fieldwork. She focuses on the situated organization of social interactions in institutional settings. Her first studies centered around police and judicial interactions in France and the United States. More recently, she has conducted several projects on nurses' unscheduled interactions with co-workers in Swiss hospitals, with particular focus on telephone conversations, corridor interactions, and mobility and recruitment practices.

**Angeliki Balantani** is a researcher in multimodal conversation analysis. She completed her PhD in linguistics at the University of Essex, where she investigated responses to informings in Greek talk-in-interaction. Her current research focuses primarily on human sociality and the interplay of language, gaze and gesture in the production of social actions. Her recent work includes investigations of deixis, joint attention, reference construction, joint decision making and action coordination that have been published in *Journal of Pragmatics*, *Language and Communication*, *Lingua* and *Gesprächsforschung*.