Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World

How do people organize their body movement and talk when they interact with one another in the material world? How do they coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources (such as gaze and gesture) to bring about coherent and intelligible courses of action? How are physical settings, artifacts, technologies, and non-linguistic sign-systems implicated in social interaction and shared cognition? This volume brings together advanced work by leading international scholars who share video-based research methods that integrate semiotic, linguistic, sociological, anthropological, and cognitive science perspectives with detailed, microanalytic observations. Collectively they provide a coherent framework for analyzing the production of meaning and the organization of social interaction in the complex and heterogeneous settings that are characteristic of modern life: ranging from ordinary and bilingual conversation to family interaction, and from daycare centers to work settings such as airplanes, clinics, and architects' offices, and to activities such as auctions and musical performances. Several chapters investigate how participants with communicative impairments (aphasia, blindness, deafness) creatively build meaning with others. Embodied Interaction is indispensable for anyone interested in the study of language and social interaction. This volume will be a point of reference for future research on multimodality in human communication and action.