Frasformade instruktioner med uppföljningar under personlig träning

Abstract

<p>Personal training is a new form of institutional interaction that has not been extensively studied as regards language. Still, alongside embodied interaction, language is central in this activity. In this paper, phrasal utterances are studied as a resource for instructing in personal training. The data consist of 7 h 23 min of video recordings of training sessions with Swedish-speaking participants from Finland and Sweden, which are supplemented with field notes. The theoretical–methodological framework includes interactional linguistics, ethnography of communication, and variational pragmatics. Results show that participants use all semiotic information at hand when they produce and understand phrasal instructions during personal training. This process involves the overall activity, the participants’ institutional roles as trainer and client, their body positions and movements, and trajectories of earlier interaction and embodied elements of the instructions themselves. Phrasal instructions are short; thus, they are focused and easily integrated into the ongoing physical activity. Certain differences are observed between the data from Finland and from Sweden, e.g., Finnish data have more phrasal instructions, whereas the Swedish data have more third-turn follow-ups, which may indicate cultural differences in this domain. The article concludes that phrasal utterances are not only useful as instructions in personal training but also well-suited for the activity type. </p>