ABSTRACT

This collection brings together a range of perspectives on multimodal communication in intercultural interaction, bridging cognitive, social, and functional approaches towards promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues and taking research at the intersections of these fields into new directions.

The volume assembles conversationalist, socially oriented, cognitive, and sensory approaches in considering culture as a dynamic construct, co-constituted and (re)negotiated among participants in interaction and filtering it through a multimodal lens, drawing on a range of examples, such as educational settings or online video platforms. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on "culture" and "intercultural," while also situating their own definitions of these labels against those of the other chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a fluid conversation on the nature of intercultural encounters in today’s globalizsd world, as digital environments intertwine with the physical mobility of people, encouraging researchers across these fields to adopt a more holistic multimodal perspective to approach intercultural interaction.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multimodality, sociolinguistics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, and semiotics.

chapter 1|14 pages

Introduction

Multimodal communication in intercultural interaction

part 1|43 pages

Conceptualising multimodality in intercultural interaction

chapter 2|24 pages

Multimodality and the issue of culture

A social semiotic perspective onto the interculturality of communication

chapter 3|17 pages

Rhythmic bodies

Sensorial multimodality, entrainment, and intercultural communication

part 3|138 pages

Doing multimodality in intercultural interaction

chapter 6|30 pages

Modal particles in multimodal language use

Towards a cognitive, comparative, and intercultural approach to German as a Foreign Language teaching