Verbal and Nonverbal Modalities in Face-to- -face Interaction: How They Function as Conversational Signals

From a multimodal point of view, the functions which have generally been attributed to linguistic elements of discourse (known, as a rule, as discourse markers or connectors within the several discourse analytic theories) can also be fulfilled by prosody and nonverbal units. These types of discourse functions, here called interactive conversational signals, a subgroup of the conversational signals, will be analyzed from a multimodal perspective. Thus, after identifying the different units of analysis – i.e. linguistic, non-linguistic, prosodic and nonverbal – a few minutes of a recorded face-to-face interaction between three Portuguese students will be micro-analysed. The micro-analysis consists in the prosodic transcription of the corpus, in the description of the body movements of the interaction partners, as well as in the identification of the verbal and nonverbal units they produce. Finally, considering the coordination between the segmented multimodal units, their conversational (poly) functions will be identified and their pragmatic meanings explained.