(Salle F05)
Parrill, Fey (coordinator)
(University of Chicago, Chicago)
Collaboration, common ground and concealment :
a multimodal investigation of interactive
language use
Students of language believe it to be an essentially face-to-face
interactive phenomenon, but this belief is rarely refl ected in linguistic
research, which takes constructed examples, text, or spoken language
reduced to a written transcript as primary objects of analysis.
There are exceptions, of course -notably the research program of Clark
and colleagues, which treats interaction as fundamental (e.g., Clark
1992). This body of work demonstrates that the collaborative nature
of language has consequences for every aspect of the system.
Our research additionally takes the face-to-face nature of language
use as fundamental, by adopting a model of language which includes
gesture as well as speech. In this panel, we present 3 experiments,
all involving narrations of cartoon events, which investigate the use
of language in dyadic situations. We argue that the collaborative,
interactive nature of language use is refl ected in both modalities.
We explore the ways in which both the structure of discourse and
the discourse management strategies employed by speakers and
addressees are impacted by shared knowledge, in a comparison of
narrations between friends and strangers. We assess the impact of
shared knowledge on the discourse status of elements in speech and
gesture, by manipulating both presence/ absence of an addressee
during viewing of the stimulus, and the speaker’s construal of which
element is discourse-focal. In addition, we investigate the impact
of concealment on collaboration by asking speakers to deceive
their addressees with respect to certain aspects of a cartoon-event
description, exploring changes in dyadic interaction in both speech
and gesture when normal expectations of cooperation are violated.
