The multimodal CorpAGEst corpus: keeping an eye on pragmatic competence in later life

Abstract

The CorpAGEst project aims to study the pragmatic competence of very old people (75 years old and more), by looking at their use of verbal and gestural pragmatic markers in real-world settings (versus laboratory conditions). More precisely, we hypothesise that identifying multimodal pragmatic patterns in language use, as produced by older adults at the gesture–speech interface, helps to better characterise language variation and communication abilities in later life. The underlying assumption is that discourse markers (e.g., tu sais ‘you know’) and pragmatic gestures (e.g., an exaggerated opening of the eyes) are relevant indicators of stance in discourse. This paper's objective is mainly methodological. It aims to demonstrate how the pragmatic profile of older adults can be established by analysing audio and video data. After a brief theoretical introduction, we describe the annotation protocol that has been developed to explore issues in multimodal pragmatics and ageing. Lastly, first results from a corpus-based study are given, showing how multimodal approaches can tackle important aspects of communicative abilities, at the crossroads of language and ageing research in linguistics.