In co-present interaction, our bodies are continuously available for sense-making. Linguists, however, have generally analyzed grammatical patterns, such as noun phrases, separately from the rest of human behavior. This chapter looks at a collection of cases in Swedish, English, and Estonian, where the speaker initiates a noun phrase but completes it with an embodied demonstration. Other participants treat this multimodal structure as complete and comprehensible. Building on earlier research on syntactic-bodily units (Keevallik 2013, 2017) this study calls into question the analytic boundary between language and the body and argues that grammatical projection cross-cuts modalities even within the assumedly robust noun phrase.
Article outline
Introduction
The data and the collection
Simple NP-initiations: An article, a demonstrative, an adjective
Article
Demonstrative
Adjective
Complex NP-initiations
Article + adjective(s)
Demonstrative + adjective
Participant orientation to a multimodal noun phrase: Collaborative completion
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2021.
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