Multimodal Communication from a Construction Grammar Perspective

The volume is of direct interest to scholars, from senior academics to PhD students, interested in linguistically relevant phonetic and gestural information and in the relationship between multimodal communication and grammar. It contains important work in a relatively new, dynamic and exploratory field that is receiving a lot of attention, namely the relation of multimodal communication with grammatical frameworks, notably Construction Grammar. Drawing on case studies in different languages (English, Modern Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Italian), the chapters provide both the necessary theoretical discussion and solid empirical evidence (corpus-based or experimental) for integrating multimodal interactional features with grammatical description and analysis. This timely collection of studies highlights the recent marriage of cognitive/constructional and interactional approaches and addresses head-on questions and challenges like: which multimodal features are systematic and conventional enough to be integrated into grammar and what are appropriate ways of achieving the integration.