Abstract
Recently, the claim was put forward that grammar emerges from embodied conduct. This has led to a discussion in multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics whether the routinization of embodied actions can be described in terms of grammar and grammaticalization. While particular items such as exophoric demonstratives and gestures are routinely delivered as multimodal constructions, i.e., as part of grammar, it is debatable whether this also holds for other candidates: e.g., loose couplings of verbal and embodied conduct, locally routinized, or ephemeral gestalts that do not endure beyond the context of their use. My paper contributes to this discussion by proposing a distinction between two kinds of multimodal gestalts: socially sedimented multimodal gestalts (multimodal constructions), and locally assembled, ephemeral multimodal gestalts. To this end, I examine sedimented couplings of demonstratives and embodied practices in instructions, and the change of a locally assembled format over time. The data are in German and come from 12 h of video-recordings of self-defense trainings for young women. In the course of the participants’ interactional history, the multimodal format of the participants’ actions changes. The changes concern formal and functional aspects of the resources used to accomplish those actions, their multimodal orchestration, and the temporality of their delivery. The paper makes four claims: 1. In their primordial use in co-present interaction, demonstratives are coupled with embodied practices and request addressees’ attention to the speaker’s body, i.e., they are tightly and intercorporeally coupled with the embodied conduct of the participants; 2. gesturally used demonstratives are socially sedimented multimodal gestalts, i.e., multimodal constructions; 3. multimodal gestalts may be subject to transformations in the course of multiple repetitions; 4. in my data, the transformations lead to the emergence of a new, reduced format, which, while being locally routinized, is neither grammatical nor grammaticalized.
Highlights
Spoken language and embodied practices have been studied in Conversation Analysis (Streeck at al., 2011; Stivers and Sidnell, 2012) and Interactional Linguistics (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen, 2001; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2018) for decades
Conversation-analytic and interaction-linguistic approaches resonate with Emergent Grammar (Hopper, 1987, 2011), a linguistic paradigm originally developed in the context of grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott, 2003)
We find temporally variable orders in which demonstratives, gaze shift, and embodied demonstration are mobilized in the local context
Summary
Spoken language and embodied practices have been studied in Conversation Analysis (Streeck at al., 2011; Stivers and Sidnell, 2012) and Interactional Linguistics (Selting and Couper-Kuhlen, 2001; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2018) for decades. Research on multimodality (Streeck et al, 2011; Deppermann and Streeck, 2018) has integrated the body in studying the temporality of language-in-interaction; it has begun to investigate the local emergence of grammar-body-gestalts (Keevallik, 2015, 2018a, 2018b) and the change of embodied practices over time (Streeck, 2021). Couplings of demonstratives and gestures are grammaticalized ready-mades that members of language communities ‘inherit’ from their ancestors This contrasts with the reduction and routinization of an ad hoc assembled multimodal gestalt. To contrast usages of a grammaticalized multimodal construction (so/“like this” + embodied practices) with the emergence of an ephemeral multimodal assemblage, I track the occurrence of their uses in a series of embodied instructions delivered in self-defense trainings. Cases were investigated in which instructing actions were 1) directed at the whole group and 2) designed to be followed by a performance of the instructed action
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