Modal particles in multimodal language use

Abstract

Roughly speaking, German modal particles are used particularly in spoken language in order to highlight the speaker’s mood and attitude and as a communicative resource to guide the interaction. The chapter aims at demonstrating how modal particles could be treated cognitively, multimodally, and interculturally in GFL teaching. Two exercise steps will be presented that have been documented during a course at a Brazilian university in which the students’ activities have been videotaped, transcribed, and analysed. The first step consisted of a translation exercise, and the second step of the conjoined analysis of a videotaped interaction sequence that shows an excerpt of a conversation among four German exchange students whose high use of modal particles should be analysed by Brazilian students according to the cultural context in which the sequence is embedded. The results clearly reveal what previous studies about modal particles in German and Portuguese have indicated: By translating modal particles into BP, these particles become more explicit, more complex, more interactive, as well as more appellative, and they are displayed to a higher degree prosodically and gesturally. The study presents an innovative approach to GFL teaching by going beyond activities based on automatic chunk and speech act theory in order to access modal particles cognitively, contrastively, interculturally, situatedly, and multimodally in real language use.