Abstract
Several paradigm shifts have been taking place in the field of linguistics over the past few decades. This project will explore the interfaces between three specific developments in scientific approaches to language. The first concerns the shift from viewing language as a logical system of formal symbols to approaches that take principles from cognitive psychology into account and study language in terms of underlying cognitive processes. The second concerns the growing interest in studying language as a vehicle for communication in the interactive context of face-to-face communication, rather than objectifying language as a code which an individual 'possesses'. As a third topic of interest we consider approaches that move away from viewing language as a complete and autonomous system, and rather see language as part of a 'multimodal' (audio-visual) communication repertoire, taking into account co-verbal aspects of expression such as gesture and intonation patterns. To what degree can these different properties of spoken language use be integrated into one coherent model? This project will focus on two specific theories -- Cognitive Grammar and Functional Discourse Grammar -- to see how well they can be integrated with each other and with co-verbal properties of communication. Based on theoretical and empirical exploration of points of convergence, the aim is to develop an integrated dynamic model of multimodal communication that can be modeled computationally and tested against relevant data. An existing data set of video-recorded conversations will be used to evaluate the model's predictions and allow for adjustment of the model to better represent realistic communication. In addition to having theoretical implications, the resultant model of dynamic, multimodal communication could be useful for other humanities fields like media studies, and could have applications clinically (studying the limits of language and communicative disorders) and commercially (aiding human-computer interaction).