Embodying epistemicity: Negotiating (un)certainty through semiotic objects

In institutional interaction, negotiating the certainty of the information provided by both parties (i.e., the institutional agent and the client) is a precondition for the fulfilment of the task at hand. For this purpose, documents (i.e., all those objects on which the personal data of the client and other data relevant to the case are mentioned, i.e. ‘documented’) are essential in order to validate the epistemic ground of statements and assumptions, repair misunderstandings, and help negotiating the certainty of a piece of information. This study builds on a corpus of encounters between migrants (defined as “adults-in-mobility”, AM) and Italian civil servants (“adults-in-contact-with-mobility”, ACM). During the interactions, objects such as forms, passports, ID cards, computers, sheets of papers are employed as ‘documents’; they are handled, pointed, passed, looked at, read, or simply mentioned, in order to provide and assess the information. Besides, the whole encounter cooperatively produces a final artifact (e.g., a filled form), which constitutes the basis for a public service to be provided, according to the norms, rights and duties of the social system they are part of. Such ‘intermediary objects’ (Latour, 1987) are both related to, and constitutive of, the activities performed. They are ‘called into existence’ by the interactants and are strictly dependent on the temporal development and spatial arrangement of the interactions (Brassac et al.2008; Goodwin 2000; Luff et al 2000). Through the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Analysis, this study intends to analyse: the semiotic resources deployed by the interactants for dealing with the objects; the patterns of actions in which objects are involved; their relevance for locally negotiating the 'certainty' of information; the role of objects in constructing an interaction as an 'institutional' one. Data have been collected within two European Grundtvig projects: SPICES (224945-CP-1-2005-1-IT- GRUNDTVIG-G11, www.trainingspices.net) and BRIDGE-IT (510101-LLP-1-2010-1-IT-GRUNDTVIG-GMP, http://bridge-it.communicationproject.eu). Both projects focus on the interaction within bureaucratic settings such as public service interactions; their main aims are to point out the communicative difficulties emerging in such interactions and develop educational material through which overcome and prevent communicative barriers. Besides enhancing our understanding of the multimodal dynamics affecting institutional workplace interaction, this study also aims at elaborating proposals for improving the efficiency and efficacy of such interactions, especially in multilingual/multicultural settings.