Multimodality and Active Listenership

Reviews / Votes

In face-to-face interaction movements of the head and body can carry meaning that is as important as the words. Yet in the analysis of talk, this is seldom acknowledged or methodically handled. Dawn Knight's clear and persuasive account of how such movements can be systematically recorded and analyzed achieves a major step forward for both discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. This is an important book documenting the move from mono-modal to multi-modal corpora of spoken language. It brings the reader into the exciting new world of multimodal corpora which capture much more fully the realtime context of spoken interactions, from the prosodic, to the behavioural and the situational, whereby the corpus moves from being a one-dimensional to the multidimensional repository of spoken interaction. Anyone who is interested in corpora should read this book. Based on data from the Nottingham Multimodal Corpus (NMMC), the book very clearly illustrates the process of building a multimodal corpus and it focuses on its potential for indepth research, the scale of which would not have previously been possible. The level of detail on how to build a multi-modal corpus is invaluable, including key information on recording, mark-up and coding of the data. The clear writing style and the frequent use of screenshots greatly enhance the presentation of these details making it accessible to readers who do not have a high level of technical knowledge about corpus building. The analysis of headnods from the NMMC is the main analytical focus of the book and this provides a glimpse of the potential of the new world of multi-modal corpora. It provides fascinating quantitative results and correlations on when headnods are used and when they are not. In addition, it provides a functional analysis of headnods based on the data sample. The analysis of headnods is testimony to the enormous potential of this exciting new research tool.