Multimodality and Active Listenership: A Corpus Approach

Acknowledgements Acronyms List of tables List of figures 1. Introduction 2. Corpora Beyond Text - Developing Multimodal Corpora 3. Language and Gesture 4. Backchannels 5. Analysing Backchanneling Head Nods 6. A Coding Matrix for Backchanneling Phenomena 7. Semi-automated Head Nod Tracking 8. Concluding Remarks Glossary References Index

Dawn Knight is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL), University of Nottingham, UK.

In face-to-face interaction movements of the head and bodycan carry meaning that is as important as the words. Yet in the analysis oftalk, this is seldom acknowledged or methodically handled. Dawn Knight's clearand persuasive account of how such movements can be systematically recorded andanalyzed achieves a major step forward for both discourse analysis and corpuslinguistics. -- Professor Guy Cook, Centre for Language and Communication, The Open University, UK This is an important book documenting themove from mono-modal to multi-modal corpora of spoken language. It brings thereader into the exciting new world of multimodal corpora which capture muchmore fully the realtime context of spoken interactions, from the prosodic, tothe behavioural and the situational, whereby the corpus moves from being aone-dimensional to the multidimensional repository of spoken interaction. Anyonewho is interested in corpora should read this book. Based on data from the NottinghamMultimodal Corpus (NMMC), the book very clearly illustrates the process ofbuilding a multimodal corpus and it focuses on its potential for indepthresearch, the scale of which would not have previously been possible. The level of detail on how to build amulti-modal corpus is invaluable, including key information on recording,mark-up and coding of the data. The clear writing style and the frequent use ofscreenshots greatly enhance the presentation of these details making itaccessible to readers who do not have a high level of technical knowledge aboutcorpus building. The analysis of headnods from the NMMC isthe main analytical focus of the book and this provides a glimpse of thepotential of the new world of multi-modal corpora. It provides fascinatingquantitative results and correlations on when headnods are used and when theyare not. In addition, it provides a functional analysis of headnods based onthe data sample. The analysis of headnods is testimony to the enormouspotential of this exciting new research