24 March 2021

Combining Methodology and Corpus-Building for Multimodality Research

John Bateman (Bremen University, Bremen, Germany)

As in all areas of linguistics, the use of corpora and corpus methods for investigating natural communication is also now well established in multimodality studies – at least as a goal. The practice of designing and using multimodal corpora raises many issues at theoretical, methodological and practical levels. As the ‘objects’ of analysis become multimodally more challenging, the etablished methods and assumptions inherited from linguistic corpora are placed increasingly under strain. In this talk, I set out briefly the very broad notion of multimodality adopted in our current work and make some suggestions for how to adapt multimodal corpus-based approaches to support further rounds of empirical research.