Loulou Kosmala
[Advances in Interaction Studies 11] 2024
► pp. 73–102
The present interdisciplinary and integrated approach to inter-(dis)fluency, which draws on a multilevel fluency-disfluency continuum, aims to analyze the distribution and behavior of ambivalent fluencemes in multimodal discourse. Fluencemes are highly flexible and dynamic, and their ambivalence can be evaluated by looking at several variables, such as language proficiency, register variation, or task type, among others. These findings can be yielded using a corpus-based methodology, which relies on quantitative treatments (e.g. frequency measures, percentages, average values etc.), in line with corpus-based approaches to cognitive linguistics and pragmatics (e.g. Crible, 2018; Crible et al., 2019; Schneider, 2014; Tottie, 2014, 2015). Furthermore, the degree of fluency and/or disfluency of fluencemes can be evaluated qualitatively at the interactional level, by integrating the social, sequential, and bodily actions participants may turn to when engaged in specific interactional practices (e.g. Kendon, 2004; Mondada, 2013; Sacks et al., 1974). Therefore, this study relies on a mixed-method approach (cf Morgenstern et al., 2021; Stivers, 2015; Tashakkori & Creswell, 2007) which includes quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data. Quantitative analyses rely on the treatment of dependent and independent variables in the whole dataset using statistical tools, while qualitative analyses rely on a close observation of specific occurrences in the data, examined within their ecological environment.
The present chapter is structured as follows: First, I explain my motivations for working on a videotaped dataset which comprises two corpora, the SITAF corpus and the DisReg corpus. I then describe the annotation protocol used for quantitative annotation analyses, using a specific annotation scheme. Lastly, I end this chapter with the description of the methods used to conduct the qualitative analyses.