A Multimodal Analysis of Turn-initial Particles

This book investigates how university students from different European nationalities successfully use English as a Lingua Franca in video-mediated interaction. In particular, the study analyzes the coordination of multimodal resources deployed by these participants at the beginning of their turns in online conversations. In order to investigate the deployment of multimodal resources in this turn-initial position, multimodal conversation analysis is applied to the corpus ViMELF (Corpus of video-mediated English as a lingua franca conversations). The focus of the book lies on the discussion of turn-initial particles and multimodal Gestalts. The multimodal Gestalts result from the systematic coordination of turn-initial particles with embodied resources. These include, for example, raised eyebrows and gaze aversion.