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.
Dawn Knight is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL), University of Nottingham, UK.
Michaela Mahlberg is Humboldt-Professor and Professor of Digital Humanities at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.
Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate within the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.