Abstract
Video blogs are a form of CMC (computer-mediated communication) that feature speakers who talk into a camera, and thereby produce a viewer-directed performance. Pointing gestures are part of the resources that the medium affords to design vlogs for the absent recipients. Based on a corpus of 40 vlogs, this research categorizes different kinds of common pointing actions in vlogs. Close analysis reveals the role multimodal factors such as gaze and body posture play along with deictic gestures and verbal reference in the production of a viewer-directed monologue. Those instances where vloggers point at referents outside the video frame, e.g., elements of the Web site that represent alternative modes of communication, such as written comments, receive particular attention in the present study, as they require mutual knowledge about the shared virtual context the vlog is situated in.
About the author
Maximiliane Frobenius is a research assistant and doctoral student at the Department of English Linguistics at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. Her field of research is media English, especially CMC and language on television.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston