Multimodality and Active Listenership A Corpus Approach [Hardcover]

Current corpora are invaluable resources for generating accurate and objective analyses of patterns of language use. However, spoken corpora are effectively mono-modal, presenting data in the same physical medium  text. The reality of a discourse situation is lost in its representation as text. Using multimodal data sets when conducting corpus-based pragmatic analyses is one solution. This book looks at multimodal corpora in some depth, using backchanneling as the conversational feature to be analysed. It provides a bottom-up investigation of the issues and challenges faced at every stage of multimodal corpus construction and analysis, as well as providing an in-depth linguistic analysis of a cross section of multimodal corpus data. The collaborative and co-operative nature of backchannels is highlighted in this book and an adapted pragmatic-functional linguistic coding matrix for the characterisation of backchanneling phenomena is presented. Dawn Knight also looks at possible directions in the construction and use of multimodal corpus linguistics.

Acknowledgements \ Acronyms \ List of tables \ List of figures \ 1. Introduction \ 2. Corpora beyond text - developing multimodal corpora \ 3. Language and gesture \ 4. Backchannels \ 5. Analysing backchanneling head nods \ 6. A coding matrix for backchanneling phenomena \ 7. Semi-automated head nod tracking \ 8. Concluding remarks \ Glossary \ References \ Index

Multimodality and Active Listenership: A Corpus Approach is about how language researchers can face this challenge. It provides the state-of-the-art in multimodal corpus linguistic research and corpus development, presenting practical information on the development and use of multimodal linguistic corpora...For those researchers who observe the intriguing complexity of the current communicative landscape with a mix of interest and curiosity, Multimodality and Active Listenership: A Corpus Approach will make a good guide for the introduction to the technicalã#