ABSTRACT
For some time I have wanted to say something about listening—about what listeners do while someone else is speaking. In the analysis of communication, for instance conversation analysis, the emphasis has been on turn-taking. Each participant is now listener, now speaker. But listening—what happens when someone is not the speaker, what listeners do as listeners—is not transcribed. It is absent from most of the accounts of communication we work with in linguistics, semiotics, and multimodality. The emphasis has been on the text, and yes, listeners, or audiences, are often mentioned, but as silent participants.
