Scale of ‘Relevance’ and Complementarity: Focusing on Schematic and Poetic Formations of Interaction

Abstract

The interplay of language, cognition, and culture has attracted the utmost attention of linguistic anthropologists since the inception of their discipline. By locating a research juncture for these three themes, this study focuses on both verbal and nonverbal elements employed in an interview with victims of the Fukushima disaster. More specifically, this study explores a scale of ‘relevance’ of these individuals to this disaster at four levels; the linguistic, interactional, schematic, and poetic. I closely examine the third and the fourth levels, the schematic and poetic, by exploring binaries (e.g., ‘depart-return’ and ‘action-thought’) and the poetic configurations emerging online through these binaries during the interview regarding the Great East Japan Earthquake. I also consider corporeal actions by the interviewer that support and mediate listenership whereby individuals coordinate gaze and reactive tokens, effectively involving interlocutors in the poetic construction of multimodal texts during the interviews. Grounded on the multiple levels of complementarity addressed throughout this study, I conclude that subsequent scholarship should examine the holistic orchestration of multi-layered achievements in greater depth, in order to elaborate on ways in which such an orchestration takes shape through a preferred ‘fashion of speaking.’