Language and Body in Social Interaction (La_Bô_SIn )

The ReN Language and Body in Social Interaction (La_Bô_SIn) focuses on the interplay between language and the body in social interaction. Its concern is with how resources in and for social interaction are established, selected and used in various institutional and everyday settings. Based on the idea that resources are fundamentally indexical, the ReN explores how both verbal and bodily resources are adjusted and fitted to their context of use, how they become routinized in that context and how they sediment across multiple uses.

Examples of such explorations are:

• the sequential organization of grammatical resources
• the grammaticalization of verbal constructions
• the sequential organization of embodied practices
• the systematicity of body movements
• the situated design of gaze practices
• practices dealing with materiality in social interaction
• the formation of complex multimodal configurations or Gestalten
• the routinization and sedimentation of such configurations across multiple uses and contexts.

Aims of the ReN

The ReN's objective is to foster explorations on language and the body within and across languages, activities and settings from a fundamental, comparative and applied perspective.
By providing a platform for a continuous dialogue among researchers in the field, the ReN aims to address a large variety of configurations and forge innovative ways of establishing cross-contextual generalities.
Special attention is paid to the way in which the constrained ecologies of institutional and professional settings work and how verbal and embodied resources are mobilized accordingly.
Focal concerns of empirical and applied linguistics are therefore targeted together with more general issues concerning the contextual intertwinement of linguistic and embodied conducts.

Activities

The life of the network La_Bô_Sin is animated through regular workshops organized each year at the Universities of Basel, Neuchâtel and Lausanne in which members of the network present their ongoing research on the ReN's topic and collectively discuss their findings. Moreover, regular data sessions are held in all three locations with researchers from the network as well as from outside.

Events

2.5.2019         Workshop: "Grammar and the Body", Univ. Neuchâtel
14.6.2019       Data Session Day: "Multimodality and multisensoriality", Univ. Basel
23-24.10.19    Workshop: “Interfaces between grammar and the body”, Univ. Neuchâtel
tba.                  Workshop: "Multimodal Gestalt - formation and sedimentation", Univ.  Lausanne
tba.                 Workshop: “Comparing embodied practices across contexts and ecologies”, Univ. Basel

ReN initiators and coordinators

Lorenza Mondada, Univ. Basel (lorenza.mondada@unibas.ch)
Simona Pekarek Doehler, Univ. Neuchâtel (simona.pekarek@unine.ch)
Anja Stukenbrock, Univ. Lausanne (anja.stukenbrock@unil.ch)