Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation

Download or read book Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation written by Xiaoting Li and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action and interaction. Adopting the methodology of interactional linguistics, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of the three multimodal resources and the sequential environments in which they appear. It demonstrates that syntax, prosody and body movements not only converge but also diverge in projecting possible turn completion. As one of the few systematic studies of multimodality in Mandarin interaction, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis.