Abstract
Based on a video recording of conversational British English, this paper aims at describing the relation between verbal and non-verbal signals in the production process of parentheticals within the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Parentheticals are described in linguistics as side sequences interrupting linear development. Although their syntactic, prosodic, and discursive characteristics have been deeply analysed, few studies have focused on the articulation of the different communicative modes in their production process. Beyond showing that gesture brings complementary information in regard to prosody, contributing to a composite collateral message, the results allow better delineation and understanding of skip-connecting phenomena as constructing coherence. Changes in the modal configuration throughout the parenthetical sequence suggest modes are dynamic and flexible resources for indexing parentheticals and their particular framing function.
About the authors
Manon Lelandais is a postgraduate student in English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She works on Information Structure in Multimodal Discourse Analysis, with a particular focus on so-called secondary syntactic constructions. Her study is based on video files of spontaneous conversations. In the present paper, she shows that discourse parentheses are more frequently marked as disruptions in prosody, are indeed fully integrated to the discourse flow thanks to participants’ gestures. She is also more generally interested in what type of information is coded in side sequences and what semiotic modes are used by participants to the interaction to actually encode these various information types.
Gaëlle Ferré is currently an Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics & phonology, but also Discourse Analysis both at undergraduate and graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English, in a linguistic-oriented approach, which aims at understanding the organisation of information from the different modalities in spontaneous speech to form a message. The modalities she is particularly interested in are verbal (semantics and discourse organisation/pragmatics), vocal (prosody), and visual (gestures). Her recent research in Multimodality, which is part of a nationally funded project, has led her to work on the annotation of co-verbal gestures, prosody and discourse structure in conversational French.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our two participants Alexandra and Rhianna, as well as the staff at the Audio-Visual Centre at the University of Nantes. We are also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.
Appendix: transcription conventions
- (h)
Audible inbreath
- #
Pause
- XXX
Inaudible word (X stands for 1 syllable)
- (…)
Vocal activity (laughs, giggles, swallowing, sighs)
- *…*
Low intensity
- […]
Illustrated gestural activity
- -
Interrupted construction
- (A)
Antecedent
- (P)
Parenthetical
- (R)
Resumption
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