Syntax and music for interaction: ‘Music-taking-predicate’ constructions in Hebrew musician-to-musician discourse

Yuval Geva
University of Haifa

Abstract

Multimodal constructions which intertwine language and music are characteristic of the discourse of creative encounters among musicians. This interactional linguistic study reports on one such construction: the ‘music-taking-predicate’ (MTP) construction. MTP constructions consist of a projective verbal predicate, and a stretch of sung or played musical expression following it. Based on naturalistic video data of Hebrew-speaking musicians in rehearsals and production sessions, I show that instances of this construction emerge as formulae for the achievement of several interactional tasks integral to the process of joint music making.

Keywords:
Publication history

Date received: 21 July 2023

Date accepted: 1 August 2023

Published online: 15 September 2023

Table of contents

When managing conversational exchanges in any setting, participants rarely rely on only one modality in order to get interactional work done. Participants do things using a myriad of linguistic, embodied, visual, and environmental resources; and they do so in an integrative, intertwined manner. Recent studies in interactional linguistics (IL) and multimodal conversation analysis reveal that depending on an activity’s specific ecology, potentially every detail of an encounter can be turned into a resource for social interaction (Mondada 2016, 338).

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