In this paper, we illustrate how participants in conversations conducted in the vast field spatially orient their bodies to each other depending on the environments and the contexts they are in. In particular, we focus on the way in which body arrangements in F-formations are influenced by social contexts, such as social relationships among participants and their roles in the activity. A detailed analysis of the video data from our fieldwork at Nozawa-Onsen Dosojin festival shows that participants develop various body arrangements such as the circular, the side-by-side, and the `horseshoe' formations, with or without outsiders. We discuss dynamic social contexts, i.e., membership categories relevant to the ongoing activity, play an important role in organizing these spatial-orientational arrangements.
@InProceedings{DEN18.11, author = {Yasuharu Den}, title = {F-formation and Social Context: How Spatial Orientation of Participants' Bodies is Organized in the Vast Field}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Hanae Koiso and Patrizia Paggio}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-16-0}, language = {english} }
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