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Multimodal Communication from a Construction Grammar Perspective
Edited by Kiki Nikiforidou and Mirjam Fried
[Constructional Approaches to Language 38] 2025
► pp. 38–69

Multimodality, conventionality and inheritance in dialogic constructions

ORCID logo | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
The chapter investigates the multimodal correlates of a family of dialogic challenging constructions in Modern Greek, anchored to the form ela (2nd person singular imperative of the verb erxome ‘come’). First, prosodic features of these constructions are analyzed in terms of intonation measurements in a production experiment, then gestural features are tested in terms of conventionality in a recognition task. Gesture salience (defined independently of linguistic input) and the functional space of gestures are discussed as factors that may explain successful and unsuccessful results in matching gestures and constructions. Preliminary results suggest that while prosodic features can be integrated in constructional (grammatical) descriptions and into inheritance relations, the gestural correlates cannot as straightforwardly. Recognizing gesture constructions, optionally coindexed with grammatical ones, may be one way of resolving the issue.
Keywords: (prosody, gesture) inheritance, conventionality, gesture salience, functional space (of gestures), Modern Greek
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The constructions
    • 2.1The simple ela challenging construction
    • 2.2The ela tora construction
    • 2.3The ela more construction
    • 2.4The ela (mu) de construction
  • 3.Intonation features and inheritance networks
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Results
    • 3.3Integrating intonation features in constructional networks
  • 4.Non-verbal correlates of the ela challenging constructions
    • 4.1Data, methodology and results
    • 4.2Successful matching and the role of salience
    • 4.3Unsuccessful matching and the functional space of gestures
    • 4.4Inheritance relations and gesture constructions
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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