Multimodal signals of high commitment in expert-to-expert contexts

Abstract

The paper merges research in multimodality with studies in epistemics and discourse analysis, and analyses the ways in which expert speakers multimodally display their knowledge and their degree of commitment toward it. In a corpus of video abstracts where medical researchers orally illustrate their findings published in the British Medical Journal, body signals of high commitment – palm-up-open-hand, headshake, eyelid-closure, and shoulder shrug – are analyzed from a semantic and cognitive point of view as markers of high certainty and obviousness. The differences and relationships among body epistemic markers and their concomitant lexical affiliates, along with their semantic nuances, are illustrated in depth.