Project
A constructional multimodal approach to coordination in discourse
This project aims at describing the verbal, vocal, and gestural features participating in coordination in English. The study will rely on a corpus of audiovisual recordings of unprepared dialogues, semi-scripted TV talk-shows, and television broadcast news. The objectives of this study are twofold. We investigate 1) how speakers express coordinate structures, as we identify recurrent verbal, vocal, and visual marks of coordination through the presence of multimodal boundary cues. We also investigate 2) whether speakers use coordinate constructions in the same proportion and manner across different discourse formats and across different types of discourse sequences. We then propose a representation of coordinate structures as multimodal constructions in discourse, based on their impact on speakers' interpretative frames and on co-speakers' attentional frames.