Prospective indexical

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Prospective indexical
Author(s):	Aug Nishizaka (Chiba University, Japan) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2565-0934)
To cite:	Nishizaka, Aug. (2023). Prospective indexical. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: []

The term prospective indexical was coined by Goodwin (1996) as a notion to be used to explore how vision is organized in interaction. A prospective indexical is a designedly unspecified descriptive or evaluative word or phrase. It is compared to Sacks’s (1978) notion of story preface; for example, the utterance “An interesting thing happened today” projects the specification of the interesting thing to ensue in the speaker’s subsequent talk and motivates the recipients to refrain from taking a full turn till they find the specification in the speaker’s talk. However, recipients may find the specification of a prospective indexical in the environment of the current interaction, instead of talk. Thus, a prospective indexical can be an instruction for seeing a specific thing in the environment as well as an instruction of interpreting the subsequent talk.

In the following example, in which Brad, Julie, and Jay are present at an operation room at an airport and Brad and Gate are talking over the radio, the word “problem” (line 6) is an instance of a prospective indexical. “The sense of what constitutes ‘the problem’ is not yet available to recipients but is instead something that has to be discovered subsequently” (Goodwin 1996: 358).

(Goodwin 1996: 380)

((lines 1-6, 9-13, and 17 spoken through radio))

01  Gate:    Operations, Come in. 
02           (2.4)
03  Brad:    Go ahead Mister Wilson.
04           (3.5)
05  Gate:    Yeah Pete
06           We definitely have a problem here on this je:t bridge.
07           (3.2)
08  Jay:     Which gate.
09  Brad:    What gate.
10           (2.1)
11  Gate:    A: twelve.
12           (2.0)
13  Brad:    Do you [know what the: problem is.
14  Julie:          [Uhoo:::eh::::
15  Julie:   It’s covering ha[lf of the ai(h)rpl(h)ane.
16  Jay:                     [Eh Heh Huh huh huh huh
17  Gate:    It’s not taking ground power to the aircraft.

The speaker (Gate) specifies the problem by describing it in line 17. However, prior to this, Julie, who turns to the monitor array during Gate’s utterance in line 6, “sees” the problem as an incorrectly connected boarding bridge (line 15). After Gate specifies his gate (line 11), Julie——gazing at the monitor array——produces first a reactive expression (a response cry, in Goffman’s 1978 term) (line 14) and then a description of the problem that she has located on a monitor (line 15). The word “problem” in line 6, thus, functions as an instruction to see something in the environment as a problem as the ongoing interaction unfolds (cf. Nishizaka 2000 for related examples).

Two additional notes: First, what Julie sees was not the intended problem at the gate. This indicates that the prospective indexical not only awaits the subsequent specification but also perceptually structures the environment in a publicly available (“transparent”) fashion. In fact, it is not only Julie but also Jay that witnessably reacted to what was visible. Second, both Julie’s response cry and Jay’s laughter are only intelligible as reacting to an occurrence in their (spatially and/or temporally) immediate vicinity. In addition, these reactive behaviors allocate evaluative values to the occurrence (e.g., surprising, funny, etc.). Thus, they—combined with a fixed gaze in one direction—serve as a strong resource for recipients to specify what the speakers have seen and how (e.g., as problematic) (cf. Goodwin 1996: 393).

The concept of prospective indexical has been referenced as an analytic tool in many studies, but its importance lies in the way it points to the essentially interactional nature of visual perception and the essentially multimodal nature of talk-in-interaction.

Additional Related Entries:

• Multimodality
• Project
• Multiactivity
• Embodiment
• Projection

Cited References:

Goffman, E. (1978). Response cries. Language, 54, 787-815.

Goodwin, C. (1996). Transparent Vision. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff & S. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and Grammar (pp. 370-404). Cambridge University Press.

Nishizaka, A. (2000). Seeing What One Sees: Perception, Emotion and Activity. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7, 105-123.

Sacks, H. (1978). Some Technical Considerations of a Dirty Joke. In J. Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction (pp. 249-269). Academic Press.

Additional References:

Goodwin, C. (2017). Co-operative Action. Cambridge University Press.