The body in interaction

Abstract

In linguistics, but also in sociology, philosophy, psychology and education, human communication was for a long time considered to be an exchange of signs (Saussure 1959). Neither the materiality of the signs, their sounds, visual shapes, haptic qualities, etc. nor the bodily, psychophysical nature of the participants in a communicative episode mattered to the concept of communication and social interaction. Participants have been treated as sign-printing and -decoding machines, as symbol systems (Newell 1982), which can be reduced to abstract processing modules. The last years, however, have seen an increasing interest in the humanities to move away from abstract understandings of communication to a recognition of the irreducible role of the body in social interaction (Norris 2004; Stivers and Sidnell 2005; Streeck et al. 2011; Deppermann 2013a; Hazel et al. 2014; Nevile 2015). This perspective links up with an increasing recognition of the importance of temporality as a fundamental property of all meaningful conduct (Auer 2009; Streeck and Jordan 2009; Auer and Pfander 2011; Deppermann and Giinthner 2015). The current volume brings together these two lines of research. It asks how social interaction is organized as a multi-modal, multi-sensory process of bodily activities. Each chapter in this volume reveals ways in which participants in social interaction coordinate linguistic and physical action and the expressive modalities of the body (facial display, gaze, gesture, etc.) and incorporate the environment in their activities as they structure and make sense with each other from moment to moment. Although the topic of this volume articulates a current trend in research on social interaction, there have been important predecessors on whose work this enterprise can build. Using video-data, studies from the school of “context analysis” (Birdwhistell 1970; Scheflen 1972) charted the bodily matrix of kinesic-visible actions and their temporal trajectories in precise detail (for a historical account see Leeds-Hurwitz 2010). Following Scheflen’s lead, researchers such as Kendon (1970, 1990, 2004), and Erickson and Shultz (1979) investigated body motion and changing spatial relations among the interactants’ bodies as “contextualization cues” Originally published in: Deppermann, Arnulf/Streeck, Jürgen (Eds.): Time in Embodied Interaction. Synchronicity and sequentiality of multimodal resources. Amsterdam [et al.]: Benjamins, 2018. Pp. 1-29. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 293) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.293.intro