Embodied Interaction: Language And Body In The Material World (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives) - Softcover

“Some of the best work now being done on the study of the intimate organization of human interaction is assembled in this book. It shows how, in interaction, multiple semiotic systems are always in play, and makes clear how no system studied in isolation, such as verbal expression or gesture, can be fully understood without grasping how it is orchestrated with others. The editors provide an extremely valuable introduction that sets the work presented in the volume in historical context and explains very clearly how the individual contributions fit together. The book will afford a major advance toward the inclusive theoretical framework that must eventually be developed if we are to have an appropriate grasp of how humans jointly achieve the coherent interactions through which they understand each other and the worlds in which they live. It will have very important implications for how language and human sociability are to be conceived of and understood.”
–Adam Kendon, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania
“The papers gathered here make a powerful case for an integrated perspective on meaning making in embodied interaction in the material world – implying an important caveat for 'language first' or logocentric approaches to interaction.”
–Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, University of Helsinki

How do people organize their body movement and talk when they interact with one another in the material world? How do they coordinate linguistic structures with bodily resources (such as gaze and gesture) to bring about coherent and intelligible courses of action? How are physical settings, artifacts, technologies and non-linguistic sign-systems implicated in social interaction and shared cognition? This volume brings together advanced work by leading international scholars who share video-based research methods that integrate semiotic, linguistic, sociological, anthropological and cognitive science perspectives with detailed, microanalytic observations. Collectively they provide a coherent framework for analyzing the production of meaning and the organization of social interaction in the complex and heterogeneous settings that are characteristic of modern life. Embodied Interaction is indispensable for anyone interested in the study of language and social interaction. This volume will be a point of reference for future research on multimodality in human communication and action.