A multimodal approach to coordination in
spontaneous conversation
This chapter proposes a constructional framework that includes the verbal, vocal, and gestural
modalities to describe coordination in conversation. I suggest a definition for coordination that is not
modality-specific, and provide a detailed analysis of two coordinate structures from a corpus of spontaneous speech in
British English that illustrates this definition. To assess its implications, a series of exploratory analyses
investigating a relationship between discourse sequence type and coordination was carried out. This study is the first
step into a new model for coordination that contributes to the development of a cognitive-linguistic approach to
multimodal and interactional features of language use.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1Cognitive and Construction grammars
- 2.2Coordination in other linguistic subfields
- 2.3Coordination between discourse units
- 2.4Coordination between prosodic units
- 2.5Coordination between gesture units
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Research questions
- 3.2Corpus transcription and annotation
- 3.3Working definition of coordination and annotation
- 4.Coordination: Detailed analysis of two examples
- 4.1Coordination in a description sequence
- 4.2Coordination in a question-answer sequence
- 4.3Summary
- 5.Corpus overview
- 6.Exploratory analyses I and II
- 6.1Analysis I. Discourse sequence type
- 6.1.2Discussion of analysis I
- 6.2Analysis II. Coordination modality
- 6.2.1Discussion of analysis II
- 7.General discussion and conclusion
- 7.1Methodological developments
- 7.2Perspectives
- Supplementary material
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Notes
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Bibliography
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Appendix