Description
Lýsingin er á ensku:The basic and primary use of language is in a face-to-face conversation, “all others are being best described in terms of their manner of deviation from that base” (Fillmore, 1981; in Clark, 1996, p. 8). The understanding of language must therefore come from research of natural language between humans speaking, or signing, face-to-face. In such situations, participants use various multimodal cues, e.g., sound, linguistic and paralinguistic features, bodily language, including facial expressions, hand gestures, and empathetic wince to convey a specific meaning and reach a common ground. Other factors, such as situational context and cultural reference, affect the use of stylistic features, vocabulary, and grammatical rules. Language is thus used in a multimodal manner, and from the perspective of multimodal communication, psycholinguistics and cognitive sciences it is also considered a multimodal phenomenon (O’Connell et al., 1990; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Barsalou et al., 2003; Vigliocco et al., 2014; Skipper, 2014; Jacobsen, 2015).
Today, in the field of language learning, applied linguistics, sign language studies, and artificial intelligence, the traditional language models as suggested by De Saussure and Bühler are insufficient. They describe language from the perspective of a speaker and a listener, without considering all other modes of communication that are naturally part of human language. For instance, De Saussure (2011) considers language as a linguistic sign that unites a concept and a sound-image, whereas the sound-image is not a material sound but a psychological imprint of the sound and the impression that it makes on our senses (p. 66). Bühler (2011) views language as organum, i.e. “for the one to inform the other of something about the things” (p. 30). According to this, language is a production of acoustic phenomena consisting of three largely independently variable semantic relations: expression, appeal and representation. This article proposes the Multimodal Model of Language (see Figure 1). This model views language as a multimodal phenomenon, consisting of meaningful spoken or signed utterances, i.e. not of words in isolation, but of words representing a meaningful communicative act affected by multiple cues and senses present in the production and perception of language.
| Period | 14 Jul 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 48th Poznań Linguistic Meeting: PLM2018: Language and evolution: Issues and perspectives |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Poznan, PolandShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |