Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World

by Jürgen Streeck, Charles Goodwin (Editor), Curtis LeBaron (Editor)

How do people organize their body movement and talk when they interact with one another in the material world? How do they coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources (such as gaze and gesture) to bring about coherent and intelligible courses of action? How are physical settings, artifacts, technologies, and non-linguistic sign-systems implicated in social interaction and shared cognition? This volume brings together advanced work by leading international scholars who share video-based research methods that integrate semiotic, linguistic, sociological, anthropological, and cognitive science perspectives with detailed, microanalytic observations. Collectively they provide a coherent framework for analyzing the production of meaning and the organization of social interaction in the complex and heterogeneous settings that are characteristic of modern ranging from ordinary and bilingual conversation to family interaction, and from daycare centers to work settings such as airplanes, clinics, and architects' offices, and to activities such as auctions and musical performances. Several chapters investigate how participants with communicative impairments (aphasia, blindness, deafness) creatively build meaning with others. Embodied Interaction is indispensable for anyone interested in the study of language and social interaction. This volume will be a point of reference for future research on multimodality in human communication and action.

326 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2011

About the author

Dr. Jürgen Streeck (1952) is German linguist (Dr. phil. FU Berlin 1981) has been one of the pioneers in the study of multi-modal (embodied) human interaction. Employing micro-ethnographic research methods, he has shown how speakers in face-to-face interaction coordinate eye-gaze with their hand gestures and speech; use material objects to symbolize their interactional process; and conduct meta-communication by self-touch and body postures. Jürgen’s co-edited books Embodied Interaction. Language and the Body in the Material World (Cambridge 2011, with C. Goodwin and C. LeBaron) and Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction (Oxford 2017, with C. Meyer and S. Jordan) have helped lay the foundations of the field. His book Gesturecraft – The Manu-facture of Meaning (Amsterdam 2009) is based on 20 years of video-based research on gestures of the hand, and in Self-Making Man. A Day of Action, Life, and Language (Cambridge 2017), Jürgen examines a plethora of moments of moving, standing, looking, gesturing, speaking, and managing during one workday of the owner of a local auto-repair shop. More recently, Jürgen has developed an interest in touch, one of the least studied and understood modalities of communication, and in interactions between humans and other animals.

Trained as a linguist, Jürgen has always maintained an interest in language diversity and evolution and the role of languages in social, cultural, and mental life. He has pursued this interest by following the development of hip hop and the playful and creative ways it makes music out of language.

Reviews

[Annuska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Summaries of research on Embodied Interaction. Inspiring!