Project Details
Projekt
Multimodality of referring to persons. Pronominal person reference in emergency trainings of medical staff and firefighters
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Karola Pitsch
Subject Area
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457855466
The project is part of the Research Unit „Practices of referring to persons: personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in use“. The goal of the project is to investigate the mulitmodal dimension of pronominal person reference and to sytematically describe how it is used in interactional situations with a complex participation framework. It starts from the basic assumption that communicative and social practices in face-to-face situations are organized in a mutlimodal manner, so that linguistic phenomena – here: pronominal person reference – are embedded in a dynamic interpla of different communicational resources. Verbal language, gaze, gesture, bodily orientation, mobility together form „complex communicative gestalts“ (Mondada 2014:140) which emerge dynamically in the course oft he interaction, are configured and re-configured. Within the idea of multimodal grammar-in-interaction empirical investigations of the multimodal organization and use of personal pronouns and ensuing concpetualizations constitute a desideratum. Based on a corpus of video and eyetracking data of complex training situations of emergencies, the project adresses the following questions: (1) Which interactional dynamics and regularities can be found in the interplay of verbal and embodied communicational resources when referring to persons by using personal pronous? (2) How can pronominal person reference be conceputalized as a complex, sequential and interactionally organized „communicative gestalt“? Is there a functional separation of tasks between verbal and embodied communicational resources? (3) Which influence have interactivity, a dynamic participation framework, orientation to the adressee, mobility, orientation in space, and stance taking have on the practice of pronominal person reference? (4) What does it mean for a concept of pronominal reference when, on the verbal level, the pronoun does not occur and referring is realized by gaze and bodily resources solely? (5) How does person reference change depending on the ways in which participants are institutionally categorized (severeness of injury, death, adressability, functional role and which implications ensue from this? The project aims at the following results: (1) Empircally: Systematic reconstruction of pronominal person reference as a multimodal gestalt and its sequential positiong investigating the function of different modalities and the role of interactivity, mobility and participation framework. (2) Methodologically: Linking qualitative micro-analytic case studies with a corpus lingustic approach. (3) Conceptually: Contribution to further developing the idea of multimodal grammar-in-interaction and developing a multimodal approach to pronominal person reference and to the discussion of the status of „embodiment“ within grammar.
DFG Programme
Research Units
