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Project

InSight Linguistics - developing a 3-D landscape of language use.

The most basic setting of language use is face-to-face conversation. Despite the tacit agreement on the primacy of dialogue both from a phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspective, the cognitive sciences concerned with the cognitive underpinnings of language have paid surprisingly little attention to the interactive grounding of the language system and its function in shared cognition (Clark 1996; Levinson 2006; Pickering & Garrod 2004). Only recently, cognitive linguists and psycholinguists have started to develop models that explicitly incorporate dialogicity and intersubjectivity. This project envisages the development of a new empirical method for recording and annotating linguistic interaction, which maximally embraces the multimodal and multifocal aspects of language use. The innovativeness of the approach resides in its bidirectionality, both at the level of the recording technique, where the interlocutors perspective and behaviour will be tracked using head-mounted eye trackers, and the ensuing cognitive linguistic model, which factors in the alignment processes between speakers in online interaction. What emerges is a three-dimensional landscape of language use.
Date:1 Nov 2009 →  31 Oct 2011
Keywords:Eye-tracking, Language use, Multimodality
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies