Medico e paziente: un’interazione co-costruita e “incarnata"

This paper examines the co-construction of the interactional structure of a multiparty medical encounter occurring in an Italian public health institution. It is focused on sequences in which participants address problematic or delicate activities at different stages of the institutional interaction, thanks to multimodal resources such as gaze, laugh, proxemic posture, and, of course, verbal language. An emic approach is adopted in the analysis of data, looking step by step at the participants’ actions and reactions, verbal and non verbal, giving rise to the rational order of conversation.