Constituting deictical origo as an interactive accomplishment: a praxeological approach of spatiality

This paper focuses on the articulation between space description and the constitution of an interactional space adequate to its production in interaction. Spatial deictical description is a classical topic of linguistics literature on spatial reference. However, this literature has been dealing more with linguistic resources as they are organized within the linguistic system than with the context of use of these resources, considering the latter as taken-for-granted. Our analysis problematizes the way in which the context of production of spatial descriptions is actively accomplished by participants within talk-and-conduct-in-interaction. The analysis focuses on a collection of cases coming from different corpora of video­taped interactional activities - ranging from route descriptions to surgical operations, from professional meetings to conversations in a car. The aim is to describe a systematic sequential environment and the interactional practices by which deictic origo is accomplished in order to make spatial description possible.