Proceedings

Proceedings of the 3rd Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication. Editors: Patrizia Paggio, Elisabeth Ahlsén, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, Costanza Navarretta. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 15 (2011), vi+87 pp. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/22532

Gesture and Speech in Interaction - 4th edition (GESPIN 4)

International audienceThe fourth edition of Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN) was held in Nantes, France. With more than 40 papers, these proceedings show just what a flourishing field of enquiry gesture studies continues to be. The keynote speeches of the conference addressed three different aspects of multimodal interaction:gesture and grammar, gesture acquisition, and gesture and social interaction. In a talk entitled Qualitiesof event construal in speech and gesture: Aspect and tense, Alan Cienki presented an ongoing researchproject on narratives in French, German and Russian, a project that focuses especially on the verbal andgestural expression of grammatical tense and aspect in narratives in the three languages. Jean-MarcColletta's talk, entitled Gesture and Language Development: towards a unified theoretical framework,described the joint acquisition and development of speech and early conventional and representationalgestures. In Grammar, deixis, and multimodality between code-manifestation and code-integration or whyKendon's Continuum should be transformed into a gestural circle, Ellen Fricke proposed a revisitedgrammar of noun phrases that integrates gestures as part of the semiotic and typological codes of individuallanguages. From a pragmatic and cognitive perspective, Judith Holler explored the use ofgaze and hand gestures as means of organizing turns at talk as well as establishing common ground in apresentation entitled On the pragmatics of multi-modal face-to-face communication: Gesture, speech andgaze in the coordination of mental states and social interaction.Among the talks and posters presented at the conference, the vast majority of topics related, quitenaturally, to gesture and speech in interaction - understood both in terms of mapping of units in differentsemiotic modes and of the use of gesture and speech in social interaction. Several presentations explored the effects of impairments(such as diseases or the natural ageing process) on gesture and speech. The communicative relevance ofgesture and speech and audience-design in natural interactions, as well as in more controlled settings liketelevision debates and reports, was another topic addressed during the conference. Some participantsalso presented research on first and second language learning, while others discussed the relationshipbetween gesture and intonation. While most participants presented research on gesture and speech froman observer's perspective, be it in semiotics or pragmatics, some nevertheless focused on another importantaspect: the cognitive processes involved in language production and perception. Last but not least,participants also presented talks and posters on the computational analysis of gestures, whether involvingexternal devices (e.g. mocap, kinect) or concerning the use of specially-designed computer software forthe post-treatment of gestural data. Importantly, new links were made between semiotics and mocap data

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Dialogue interpreting in Psychological Medicine : an exploration of rapport management practices

This thesis explores how the relational dimension of language use (Brown and Yule, 1983) is discursively co-constructed and perceived by the interlocutors that took part in a series of interpreter-mediated medical consultations. The interpreter-mediated encounters (IMEs) under scrutiny took place in an outpatient mental healthcare (MHC) clinic in Scotland called Psychological Medicine. This study is of an exploratory and qualitative nature, underpinned by a social constructivist epistemology. Also, it was empirically enabled through two datasets gathered using methods of data collection inspired by ethnographic approaches. Dataset 1 consists of transcriptions of three audio-recorded IMEs between an English-speaking consultant psychiatrist, a Spanish-speaking patient and three professional interpreters. Dataset 2 consists of retrospective interviews conducted with participants that took part in the consultations under scrutiny. The analysis was conducted in two stages. Discursive behaviours of interest were firstly traced in dataset 1 and then triangulated with the information gathered through dataset 2. Relational dynamics are operationalised in this thesis following Spencer-Oatey’s (2008) rapport management (RM) theory, grounded in the field of interactional pragmatics. By applying the principles of RM to the analysis of the two datasets, I shed light onto participants’ RM practices and resulting relational outcomes in the analysed IMEs. To do that, I present analytical descriptions of a selection of excerpts where occurrences of rapport-sensitive speech acts (RSSAs) are reported, the reasons for their occurrence, and the ways in which they are managed by all participants. Ultimately, the findings provide insights into how interlocutors create and negotiate interpersonal meanings both triadically and dyadically; the role that contextual factors play in this process; and, finally, how all participants, including interpreters, are actively engaged in efforts to manage the interactional balance by discursively handling face sensitivities, behavioural expectations and interactional goals