Our project focuses on emotive involvement as displayed during the activity of storytelling in mundane conversation. It investigates (a) how verbal, prosodic and visual cues are deployed to make specific, context-bound affects interpretable for the recipient, and (b) how the recipient responds, or more generally, how the displayed affects are dealt with in subsequent talk.
The data basis is audio-visual recordings of naturally occurring interaction, which are transcribed and analyzed on a micro level. The aim of the study is to uncover an 'interactional grammar' for the display of affectivity and its management in interaction.
The methods employed are those of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and multimodal research. In particular, we investigate the use of the following:
- rhetorical, lexico-semantic, syntactic, and phonetic-phonological resources; e.g. Haj: <<len>´`HOLla.>
- prosodic resources (including voice quality) (picture 1)
- visual resources such as body posture, head movements, hand movements, gaze and facial expression (picture 2)
Our analyses show that and how affectivity is continually made accessible and dealt with in interaction. It makes clear that affectivity is not only a somatic and/or cognitive phenomenon within the individual, but is also a fundamentally interactional phenomenon, which is constructed and negotiated through the joint efforts of the interactional partners. Such an investigation contributes to the general modelling of the "languages of emotion".
