FRAGL 47: Zur Rolle der Gestik beim gemeinsamen Imaginieren

 Abstract

Cognitive Linguistics posits that to ensure understanding during conversations, interlocutors need to establish a temporarily shared semantic framework. This implies that individual mental concepts need to be aligned in interaction to the degree that understanding is possible. One case in point where the collaborative process of meaning construction becomes visible are co-constructions, i.e. the construal of one syntactic unit by more than one speaker. While syntactic co-constructions have received considerable attention in interactional linguistics, collaborative interaction at the multimodal and especially the gestural level has received little to no attention in previous research. Therefore, this paper examines dyadic interaction and focuses on co-constructed gestures and how they are used to collaboratively construct meaning. The forms of these co-constructed gestures observed in the data range from exact gestural mirroring to contexts in which speakers adopt and paraphrase previous gestures and meanings. The analysis of the functions of these gestural co-constructions shows that they mainly serve to ground mental spaces in the current speech situation by making them visually perceptible and therefore quotable by other speakers.

Keywords:
mentale Räume, gemeinsames Imaginieren, Blending, Gestik, grounding, shared cognition
 

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