Abstract
AbstractThis article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form—in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge through novel gestural configurations like multimodal quotation and pragmatic beats to not only pace the rhythm of speech but simultaneously plot the spatial coordinates of social organization. In the course of events, we see how speakers integrate gesture, gaze, and postural orientation into the stream of their utterances to project rhythmically infused meanings of communal identity, social solidarity, and cultural opposition. (Multimodality, community, legal discourse)*
Highlights
This article examines the complex integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context
While recent micro studies have analyzed the discursive constitution of cultural identities and oppositions and moved beyond classic notions of community as a geographically bounded space (Potter & Reicher 1987; Widdicombe 1998; Wodak, Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart 1999; Hester & Housley 2002), little research has considered how a symbolic sense of community emerges in and through multimodal form, in the improvisational performance of speech-gesture synchronization
If Gemeinschaft community incorporates speaking in one voice, we have seen an index of that, as a unified chorus of discursive solidarity emerges in the wake of each officer’s response—in the multimodal discourse of exclusion and inclusion
Summary
This article examines the complex integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. Officer Two’s narrative coordinates an iconic interpenetration among talk, bodily conduct, and sociocultural context along several dimensions: (i) parallel structure integrating gestures that co-occur with imperfective aspect-marked utterances and paralinguistic pauses; (ii) integration of interlocking digits; (iii) integration of the interlocking digits into syntactic structure via the deictic particle and gaze direction; (iv) integration of the distal and the proximal demonstratives to represent historical opposition on the one hand and the current state of unity on the other; and (v) iconic integration of multimodal action and sociocultural context. In the dynamic rhythms of visualizing and foregrounding meaning, the speaker aligns with the normative sentiments of community policing, a highly valued index of professionalism, while, quite ironically, disavowing those same professional boundaries in the interview context In just this way, communal identity emerges as a contextually situated and multimodally emergent object in sociocultural space, an interactional resource embodied iconically and metaphorically in discursive form to accomplish distinct interactional work.. 6 b’cuz .I mean-, ((sped up)) (1.0) we call the ((gaze moves right to other participants))
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