Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521895634 ISBN 13: 9780521895637

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2011

Synopsis

How do people organize their body movement and talk when they interact with one another in the material world? How do they coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources (such as gaze and gesture) to bring about coherent and intelligible courses of action? How are physical settings, artifacts, technologies, and non-linguistic sign-systems implicated in social interaction and shared cognition? This volume brings together advanced work by leading international scholars who share video-based research methods that integrate semiotic, linguistic, sociological, anthropological, and cognitive science perspectives with detailed, microanalytic observations. Collectively they provide a coherent framework for analyzing the production of meaning and the organization of social interaction in the complex and heterogeneous settings that are characteristic of modern life: ranging from ordinary and bilingual conversation to family interaction, and from daycare centers to work settings such as airplanes, clinics, and architects' offices, and to activities such as auctions and musical performances. Several chapters investigate how participants with communicative impairments (aphasia, blindness, deafness) creatively build meaning with others. Embodied Interaction is indispensable for anyone interested in the study of language and social interaction. This volume will be a point of reference for future research on multimodality in human communication and action.

About this title

Book Description

How do we coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources such as gaze and gesture to bring about coherent and intelligible courses of action? How are physical settings, artifacts, technologies, and non-linguistic sign-systems implicated in social interaction and shared cognition? This volume brings together leading international scholars, who provide a coherent framework for analyzing the production of meaning and the organization of social interaction. Embodied Interaction is indispensable for anyone interested in the study of language and social interaction.

About the Author

Jürgen Streeck is a Senior Fellow at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and associate professor of communication studies, anthropology, and Germanic studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He conducts micro-ethnographic, video-based research on language and bodily action in diverse cultural contexts and workplaces. Streeck has done fieldwork among African American children; in Germany, the Philippines, and Colombia; and in an auto shop in the United States. He is interested in the coordination of linguistic structure, gesture, and other communicative modalities; the phenomenology and philosophical anthropology of the body; the relationship between embodiment and emplacement; and the bodily foundations of cognition, language, and communication. His publications include Social Order in Child Communication, Children's World and Children's Language (with J. Cook-Gumperz and W. Corsaro), Gesturecraft: The Manu-Facture of Meaning, and New Adventures in Language and Interaction.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0521895634
• ISBN 13: 9780521895637
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 326
• Editor: Streeck PhD Jürgen, Goodwin PhD Charles, LeBaron PhD Curtis