Deixis in Interaction
| Number: | P55 |
| Organizer: | Stukenbrock, Anja |
| Co-Organizer: | Peter Auer |
| Abstract: | |
| The study of deixis has been approached from a variety of different disciplines and perspectives, mainly grammatical and psycholinguistic ones. Although the phenomenon of “deixis should act as a constant reminder […] that natural languages are primarily designed […] for use in face-to-face interaction” (Levinson 1983), research on deixis from a conversation analytic stance and from the perspective of interactional linguistics is in many respects still a desideratum. In particular, this concerns aspects of sequentiality and multimodality. The panel aims to overcome this deficit by examining the use of personal, local and modal deixis within situated talk-in-interaction, and by looking at multimodal aspects of face-to-face communication related to deixis. By deixis we mean the act of establishing reference by means of a specific combination of verbal and visuo-spatial resources. The theoretical, methodological and empirical focus of this panel is thus placed on the ways in which the use of deictic expressions interacts with gaze, gesture, bodily orientation and the handling of objects in different conversational contexts. Some of the relevant questions are: - How is space created, recreated and transformed by the use of deictics, and how does it function as an interactional resource in different settings (Hanks 1990; Mondada 2005, 2007)? - What are the different roles played by the human body (and its parts) in creating joint attention? - How do projections work within and across verbal and visual resources (Streeck 1995, 2009? - How is the use of deictic expressions temporally and interactionally coordinated with visual resources, more specifically with (pointing) gestures and gaze (Goodwin 2000, 2003)? - Which linguistic theories are best suited to account for the specific interplay between verbal and visual resources which we find in deixis? - How is local, personal and modal deixis acquired in face-to-face interaction? |
|
