IS version

 

Target audience: researchers, teachers, trainers, mediators, interpreters, translators, artists, specialists in gesture and/or sign languages, doctoral students, and more broadly anyone working on the body and meaning.

 

What if we went further in the analysis of facial and bodily kinesic cues in verbal interactions? The fields of gesture studies and sign language studies have developed considerably over recent decades, following foundational work on kinesics, gesture and interaction (Birdwhistell, 1970; McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 2004; Ferré, 2011, 2019). Yet the kinesic dimension, and in particular its non-manual components — facial expressions, postures and bodily movements — remains underexplored from a genuinely transversal perspective.

This is precisely the dimension that the conference aims to bring to the fore through an interdisciplinary analysis. Cross-disciplinary approaches will make it possible to reflect on multimodality (Kendon, 2004, 2008; Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron, 2011; Mondada, 2014), and on the ways in which gesture and speech, whether spoken or signed, are co-constituted in situated interactions, particularly in teaching and learning contexts (Cicurel, 2011; Tellier, 2006, 2008), in processes of family socialisation (Morgenstern et al., 2021), or in ordinary activities of social life (Goodwin, 2000; Mondada, 2014).

Within this framework, the study of the relationships between manual, facial and bodily components in sign language expression is gaining renewed momentum. Contributions from linguistics, cognitive sciences and anthropology will give this conference a distinctive multidisciplinary dimension. Drawing on diverse field studies and a plurality of theoretical and methodological frameworks, the conference will examine the concept of kinesics, which has implications in contexts as varied as teaching, interpreting, family, professional or everyday interactions, 3D animation, and many others.

This event aims to foster collective reflection by bringing together academic research on this topic, in order to build a strong shared foundation of knowledge, enrich the diversity of our professional practices, and gather a community of researchers around these issues.

 

Thematic axes

IS version

 

1. Technologies, AI, visualisation and processing of non-manual parameters

- Automatic recognition of facial and bodily expressions

- Motion capture, modelling, 3D animation, avatars

- Visualisation, segmentation and annotation of movements and postures

- AI, digital tools, databases, multimodal video corpora

- Methodological issues: limitations, biases, innovations

=> Open to any work where technology and the body meet.

 

2. Professional gestures, embodied knowledge and situated practices

- Teaching, interpreting, mediation, training, artistic practices — but also any professional situation in which the body is a tool for action, expression or transmission

- Posture, gaze, proxemics: their roles in professional activity

- Expert gesture, invisible gesture, implicit gesture

- Bodily dimensions of skills and transmission

=> Open to any reflection on the body in professional situations.

 

3. Kinesics, non-manuality and visual-gestural grammars

- Eyebrows, gaze, mouth, bodily tension

- Syntactic, discursive and pragmatic integration

- Boundary zones between gesture and sign, emergence, lexicalisation

- Hybrid phenomena, idiosyncrasy, variation

- History, origin and transformation of non-manual parameters over time

=> Open to spoken and signed languages, with the possibility of comparative approaches across languages.

 

4. Multimodality, perception and the co-construction of meaning

Interactions and the construction of meaning

- How gestures, the body and language are woven together in interaction

- Porosity between co-speech gesture, emblems, signs and iconicity

- Visual prosody, rhythm and tempo of movement

Expressive and emotional dimensions

- Emotion, bodily intensity, expressiveness

- Self-regulation and emotional resonance in dialogue

Circulation, culture and gestural heritage

- Gestural borrowings, interlinguistic circulations and socio-cultural influences

- Transmission of gestural heritage, from the family context to socio-cultural dynamics

Theoretical and philosophical approaches

- Embodied meaning, phenomenology of gesture, semiotics and the status of the sign

- Philosophical approaches to embodied meaning, gesture, sign and expression

=> Open to human interaction, conversation, performance, perception and emotional self-regulation.

 

5. Interdisciplinary perspectives, fieldwork and methods

- Linguistics, anthropology, cognition, psychology

- Family, school, professional, institutional and artistic settings

- Visual methods, ethnography of the body, situated analysis

- Corpora and cross-disciplinary approaches

=> Open to multi-data and multi-approach research, including theoretical, historical or epistemological work: the field remains broad.

 

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Références

Birdwhistell, R. L. (1970). Kinesics and context: Essays on body motion communication. University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Cicurel, F. (2011). Les interactions dans l’enseignement des langues: Agir professoral et pratiques de classe. Didier. 

Ferré, G. (2011). Analyse multimodale de la parole. Rééducation Orthophonique, 246, 73–85. 

Ferré, G. (2019). Analyse de discours multimodale: Gestualité et prosodie en discours. UGA Éditions. 

Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489–1522. 

Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge University Press. 

Kendon, A. (2008). Some reflexions on the relation between 'gesture' and 'sign', Gesture 8/3, John Benjamins P. p348-366 

McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. University of Chicago Press. 

Mondada, L. (2014). The local constitution of multimodal resources for social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 65, 137–156. 

Morgenstern, A., Caët, S., Debras, C., Beaupoil-Hourdel, P., & Le Mené Guigourès, M. (2021). Chapter 1. Children’s socialization to multi-party interactive practices: Who talks to whom about what in family dinners. In L. Caronia (Ed.), Language and social interaction at home and school (pp. 45–86). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.32.01mor

Pfau, R., & Quer, J. (2010). Nonmanuals: Their grammatical and prosodic roles. In D. Brentari (Ed.), Sign languages(pp. 381–402). Cambridge University Press. 

Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., & LeBaron, C. (Eds.). (2011). Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world. Cambridge University Press. 

Tellier, M. (2006). L’impact du geste pédagogique sur l’enseignement/apprentissage des langues étrangères: Étude sur des enfants de 5 ans [Doctoral dissertation]. Université Paris 7. 

Tellier, M. (2008). Dire avec des gestes. Le Français dans le monde. Recherches et applications, 44, 40–50.