The Verbal-Kinesic Signal in Grammar and Discourse

Speaker

Dr. Jennifer Hinnell, University of British Columbia

Abstract

In this talk, I highlight a series of studies I’ve conducted that explore the co-speech behaviours that align with specific English utterances. These studies span a wide range of constructions, from the grammatical expression of aspect to clausal, discourse-level constructions such as parentheticals (how should I put it?), returns to a topic (anyhow), and general extenders used in list constructions (and stuff like that). Focusing on (semi)fixed, frequently used, multiword expressions in unscripted discourse, I argue that such conventionalized utterances might better be construed as multimodal units with inherent gestural and other kinesic components. I highlight methods that can support a quantitative analysis of multimodal linguistic data across a wide range of constructions and address the empirical challenges that come to the fore when we include the body as a significant contributor to the overall linguistic signal, a signal best thought of as essentially verbal-kinesic (Hinnell & Mittelberg in press).