veranstalter: Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder
ansprechpartner: Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder
email: stefan.pfaender@romanistik.uni-freiburg.de
web: https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/de/veranstaltungen/dinner-speeches/dinner-speech-stefan-pfaender
institution: HPSL
language: Englisch
location institution: Freiburg
date_raw: 6. Dezember 2017, 17:30-18:00 Uhr
date_sort: 06.12.2017, 00:00:00

Mirroring Movements.

And why a linguist should
care about the bodily synchronization in dyadic talk-in-interaction.

Stefan Pfänder, Freiburg

In his explorative presentation, Stefan Pfänder sheds some light
the first empirical findings of the interdisciplinary FRIAS Research Focus
Group “Synchronization in Embodied
Interaction”. Within the group, synchronisation is defined
as “the dynamic and reciprocal alignment of both verbal and bodily modes of expression
between interactants in dyadic talk-in-interaction”. Stefan presents the
phenomena under investigation from the linguist’s point of view; he gives the
following answers to the question raised in the subtitle of why a linguist
should care about participants’ bodily movements at all:

1. Linguistic
research is increasingly characterized by the assumption that language needs to
be investigated in its natural habitat, as it were, namely in the context of
social and often bodily interaction. 

2.
In a data set of 124 video recordings of collaborative story tellings, both verbal and bodily resources
interact constantly, and especially so in jointly produced utterances.

3. Last, but not least, some mirroring movements are
indispensable for sequences of disagreement or tension, where participants are
striving to understand each other despite of their possibly opposite points of
view.