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Figure 8a. Posture of the two participants in
line 1 of example 4.
Figure 8b. Posture of the two participants in
lines 2 and 3 of example 4.
Example 4 can be contrasted to later moments in the same
interaction where the two speakers are not involved in the interaction
to the same degree as illustrated in Figure 9. Their body is not oriented
towards the co-participant and they do not gaze at each other. At these
moments, the previous topic was finished and they had not started
a new topic yet. They nevertheless repeat phrases such as “à part
ça” ( apart from this ) and “et sinon” ( and otherwise ) which carry little
semantic content. The repeated phrases are similar from a lexical and
prosodic viewpoint (echo utterances) and they seem to be the only
link left between the two speakers, playing a role in the regulation
(in terms of cohesion, Tannen, 2007) of the interaction. The repetitions
show an interactional alignment at the level of forms, but also at a
meta-interactional level (both speakers express convergence in their
search for a new topic).
Figure 9. Postural misalignment.
6. Conclusion
One of the issues raised in the field of multimodality is precisely how
the verbal, the vocal and the visual modalities articulate with one
another in the construction of interaction. We know that information is
conveyed not only through words and sentence types at the semantic
and syntactic levels, but also through prosodic phrasing and contours
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