About the Journal

Call for Papers 2023

Human communication rests on a complex ecology of multiple resources that are orchestrated, both synchronously and sequentially, for mutual meaning-making and coordination of social action. A long tradition of linguistic research has enabled us to better understand the structures of verbal (and paraverbal) resources in language, while other branches of inquiry have advanced our knowledge of how gesture, posture and gaze are used in communication. These lines of investigation, however, have largely developed independently from each other, particularly as concerns multimodal syntactic organization. It is now time to bridge the gap and explore how syntactic and bodily conduct work in concert with each other, as the keystone of human communicative interaction.

We are looking forward to submissions targeting the syntax-body interface in interaction. Topics may include (but are not restricted to) the following:

  • How do grammatical constructions and bodily conduct work together in recurrent ways to perform specifiable actions and deal with fundamental interaction-organizational issues such as projection, completion, or backlinking?
  • How are the senses involved in syntax?
  • What can a multimodal analysis contribute to our understanding of the structure and function of grammatical constructions?
  • Is there evidence for routinization of grammar-body combinations, i.e., multimodal social action formats?
  • In what ways are such formats contingent upon the material and spatial coordinates of the local interactional context?
  • How are boundary phenomena between linguistic and bodily expressions as well as non-lexical vocalizations involved in these formats?
  • What consequences ensue for our understanding of some of the basic units of social interaction, such as the turn or the sequence?

Submission deadline April 15th.

Please note that our submission system uses OJS, an open source journal software, which makes the submission process look rather like submitting a text to a journal. It is very much intended that you only submit an abstract (300w) for the 2023 Embodied Syntax Network Conference!