Multimodality and Active Listenership

Current corpora are invaluable resources for generating accurate and objective analyses of patterns of language use. However, spoken corpora are effectively mono-modal, presenting data in the same physical medium – text. The reality of a discourse situation is lost in its representation as text. Using multimodal data sets when conducting corpus-based pragmatic analyses is one solution. This book looks at multimodal corpora in some depth, using backchanneling as the conversational feature to be analysed. It provides a bottom-up investigation of the issues and challenges faced at every stage of multimodal corpus construction and analysis, as well as providing an in-depth linguistic analysis of a cross section of multimodal corpus data. The collaborative and co-operative nature of backchannels is highlighted in this book and an adapted pragmatic-functional linguistic coding matrix for the characterisation of backchanneling phenomena is presented. Dawn Knight also looks at possible directions in the construction and use of multimodal corpus linguistics.