Embodied actions in a comprehensive grammar of talk-in-interaction – what to include and what not to include?

Beskrivelse

I am part of a project writing a grammar on Danish talk-in-interaction. The current version of this is a web-version, accessible on https://samtalegrammatik.dk (DanTIN, 2023). The grammar aims at becoming a comprehensive, descriptive grammar of the resources people use in talk-in-interaction. All descriptions in the grammar are based on analyses of record-ings of naturally occurring interactions in Danish, most of them video-recordings of private, everyday settings, where people talk, eat, drink, prepare food, play games, etc. In building the grammar, we are faced with the very practical question: Which embodied resources should we include in the grammar? As an answer to this, our general principle has been logo-cen¬tric: In the grammar, we describe only those embodied resources that are used system¬atically in the production of social actions in talk-in-interaction. One next question, then, is: which embodied resources are excluded? My answer to both questions will depart from results of the project Grammar in Everyday Life (GEL) 2019-2023, which investigated how analyses of specific social action formats (Fox, 2007; Steensig et al., in press) can be used in the creation of the comprehensive, descriptive grammar.

Inspired by especially Keevallik (2013, 2018), I will consider embodied resources
(a) that have their own position in a sequence of actions (the “inter-unit syntax”),
(b) that occupy specific slots in turn constructional units (the “intra-unit syntax”), and
(c) that accompany and modify or shape verbal actions.

The embodied features that I will discuss include: hand gestures and movements, pointing, head movements, and facial expressions. The social actions analyzed include: requests and responses to requests, questions and answers to questions, and list construction and re¬cip-ient reactions to list constructions and storytelling. As noted by Keevallik (2013), some em-bodied displays fit nicely into traditional syntactic categories or word classes, and some do not at all. I will briefly discuss the implications this has for the structure of the entire grammar.

References
DanTIN. (2023). Samtalegrammatik.dk. https://samtalegrammatik.dk/
Fox, B. A. (2007). Principles shaping grammatical practices: An exploration. Discourse Studies, 9(3), 299–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445607076201
Keevallik, L. (2013). The Interdependence of Bodily Demonstrations and Clausal Syntax. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 46(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2013.753710
Keevallik, L. (2018). What Does Embodied Interaction Tell Us About Grammar? Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2018.1413887
Steensig, J., Jørgensen, M., Mikkelsen, N., Suomalainen, K., & Sørensen, S. S. (in press). Towards a Grammar of Danish Talk-in-Interaction: From Action Formation to Grammatical Description. Research on Language and Social Interaction.

Periode	8 sep. 2023
Sted for afholdelse	Linköping University, Sverige
Grad af anerkendelse	International