The aim of this study is to characterise how verbal and non-verbal resources are utilised in narratives in the COVID-19 disaster narratives spoken by pairs of digital natives who are meeting each other for the first time.

Disaster narratives here refer to narratives about disasters such as COVID-19 (Iwasaki 1997). Usually, disaster narratives in previous studies have been narrated of past events, but this study was conducted in the midst of an ongoing disaster. The data for this study consisted of discourse conducted on 30 participants between 2021 and 2022. These were all conducted via the online conferencing tool Zoom, where each pair was asked to talk 'about COVID-19' for approximately 20 minutes. The pairs were always combined with people who had never met each other, and they were recorded and transcribed.

The results showed that first-time speakers tended to seek carefully and look for common ground in order to align and form empathy, while they did not deny the other's discourse. It was also found that the theory of emergent common ground (Clark 1996; Kecskés and Zhang 2009; Tanaka 2019) can be employed as a method for analysing the process to co-construct their positions in such discourses in which they form empathy. Furthermore, multimodal analysis showed that non-verbal behaviour tended to be used prior to verbal behaviour, and that a number of resonances (Du Bois 2014) were observed. In the presentation, the relationship between verbal and non-verbal behaviour will be clarified by showing examples of such behaviour.

(The data used in this study are from the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 2022-2024, "COVID-19 and the Digital Native Generation: Collection and Analysis of Narratives in Multiple Languages" (Project No. JP 22H00660, Principal Investigator: Kazuyo Murata))