LingLunch : Manon Lelandais

Manon Lelandais (Université de Paris)
"It's not like the best but it's ok": A broader approach to coordination

In this talk, I discuss the first steps of a project which aims at describing the verbal, vocal, and gestural features participating in coordination in English. The goal of this project is to build a constructional framework to describe coordination in spontaneous conversation. The study relies on a corpus of audiovisual recordings of unprepared dialogues, semi-scripted TV talk-shows, and television broadcast news. Although coordination has received substantial attention in different subfields of linguistics (e.g. De Vries 2005; Verstraete 2007; Haspelmath 2007), its multimodal realization in real-life interaction still remains unexplored. This project focuses on the interplay of different semiotic resources, including prosody, hand gestures, head gestures, eyebrow movement, and eye gaze in coordinate structures. While previous studies have investigated how syntax is reflected in other speech components, this study does not take syntax as the defining feature of coordination. Coordination is here a dynamic, conceptual phenomenon that takes place between symbolic structures, which can be expressed with verbal, vocal, and gestural forms, and with different boundary cues between these forms. To illustrate this new definition, I provide an analysis of several coordinate structures from my corpus of spontaneous speech. This analysis is the first step towards a new model for coordination that contributes to the development of a cognitive-linguistic approach to multimodal and interactional features of language use.