ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the production of individual utterances as multiparty activities, something done through the collaborative actions of both a speaker and a hearer. It looks at the pointing activities of Chil, a man with very severe aphasia. A primordial site for the study of human sociality can be found in a situation in which multiple participants are carrying out courses of action together, frequently through use of language. The practices used to build collaborative action frequently encompass a range of quite diverse phenomena including language structure, gesture, participation frameworks, practices for seeing and formulating structure in the environment, and embodied action and tool use. Chil’s actions are constructed through a complex footing in which he is the principal and author of the statement being made through the gesture while his interlocutor animates the talk required to explicate the gesture.
