Multimodale Listen. Form und Funktion körperlicher Ressourcen in Aufzählungen in französischen, spanischen und italienischen Interaktionen

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the practice of listing in Talk-in-Interaction. Lists are frequently used in spoken language as a discursive resource and can be considered as a universal, cross-lingual practice for structuring ideas. As such, they have been given attention in several fields of linguistics, mainly in intonation research, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. However, the role of gestures and other physical forms of expression in listing has been mostly disregarded so far. For this reason, we attempt to cast light on the form and function of gestures and other bodily resources that are embedded in this practice. We argue that lists are multimodal and that bodily resources play a major role in establishing the format and in organizing the interaction. In order to do so, we use a broad collection of examples from different sources in French, Italian and Spanish.