Multimodal Analysis of Parentheticals in Conversational Speech

Abstract

AbstractBased 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.