Walking and talking together: Questions/answers and mobile participation in guided visits

This article studies mobile social interactions and, in particular, the embeddedness of talking and walking, and their intertwined organizations. Within a conversation analytic and ethnomethodological perspective, and on the basis of a corpus of video recorded guided visits, the article shows the implications of asking questions in a mobile versus a stationary context: whereas the former are answered in a collective participation framework, the latter are given a more private, interpersonal answer. The article also analyses how speakers manage to transform an answer given on the move into a stationary one, radically modifying the participation framework characterizing the sequence. In this way, the analyses contribute to better understand the finely tuned coordination of human actions in mobile social contexts, and to show how walking and talking are reflexively organized, mutually shaping each other, one revealing what the other is performing and vice-versa.