News

Schuyler Laparle, PhD, from Tilburg University (Netherlands) brings together gesture studies with lexical semantics and opens an important parallel between lexical and gestural discourse markers using TV interview data.

Dr. Thomas J. J. Scherer, academic assistant at the Viadrina and within the EU-Horizon project „MORES - Moral Emotions in Politics“ gave an eye-opening talk on how audiovisual campaign videos aim at persuading their audience by appealing to ‚The Common Good‘. He exemplified his argumentation on the occasion of referendums on same-sex partnerships and how they strategically constellate ideals of civic and domestic community.

After the fruitful meeting in summer at the Viadrina, the team from the „Multimodal Stance-Taking in Interaction“ project at KU Leuven (Belgium) returned the invitation. Prof. Cornelia Müller gave a thoughtful talk about the results of their own stance-taking project and a guest lecture on greeting gestures and protest. Both were followed by insightful discussions.

Dr. Zeinab Laleh Khosravi from the Damghan University (Iran) gave a fascinating talk about co-speech gestures in Naqqāli, a traditional storytelling style. She compared the way of how two Naqqāli masters employ gestures during the telling of the 10th century story of Rostam and his son Sohrab.

The last lecture of the VCGSM's international lecture series this summer semester was given by the PhD team of the "Multimodal Stance-Taking in Interaction" project at KU Leuven (Belgium). Besides their great talk on mocking enactments, a constructive discussion on the challenges of research in the field of multimodal stance-taking followed with the Viadrina stance-taking team. Next semester there will be a new lecture series with exciting talks.

How do old white men talk about one of the greatest phenomenon of today’s pop culture, the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift? Prof. Dr. Jörn Glasenapp (University of Bamberg) spoke about and discussed this in his guest lecture. Being himself a committed Swifty, he shared his research on Taylor as a pop culture phenomenon in front of a really crowded audience.

As part of the International Lecture Series hosted by the Viadrina Center for Gesture and Multimodality Studies, Dr. Maria Graziano (University of Lund) gave an insightful talk on „Different rhetorical styles through different gesture production: evidence from Italian and Swedish narratives“.

Within the scope of the International Lecture Series, Dr. Philipp Dankel gave a talk on the topic of Gesture and Speech in Lists and Animated Discourse".

After the pandemic break the team of the Chair of Language Use and Multimodal Communication finally reunited with the AMU team of the Department of Multimodal Communication at the Institute of Applied Linguistics in Poznan for collaborating on their joint publication based on the binational project "Multimodal Stancetaking: Expressive Movement and Affective Stance. Political Debates in the German Bundestag and Polish Sejm".

A Toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis

Henrique Perissinotto (RWTH Aachen) started the summer program of the International Lecture Series hosted by the VCGMS with a talk on "Embodied Metacognition in dance and musical improvisation".

Gestural mimesis as ‚as-if‘ action.

Kaufhaus-Kaleidoskop: Von Paaren, Kassenbändern und Baumarktgesprächen

This spring the Viadrina Gesture Center started a new international lecture series. During this year's first hybrid event, Ryan Lepic and Corrine Occhino presented insights into their research on American Sign Language.

Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking Metaphors: The Spectrum of Metaphor and the Multimodality of Discourse

31.01-01.02.2024: The artists' collective Polar Publik visited the chair in order to learn and discuss about how to communicate in metaphors and gestures about the topic of ruptures (Bruch).

Cornelia Müller was invited to teach at the LOT Winter School 2024 in Tilburg.

The Linguistics Department at European University Viadrina organised a research school for PhD students. In the tradition of culturally-oriented language research at European University Viadrina, the winter school teached methods that allow to study language as an interactive, socially embedded and

As a positive effect of the online courses from the time of the coronavirus pandemic, we began to open up the research seminars internationally in 2023. As this has met with great interest in the internactional community, we have opened up the seminar further for 2024.

Doctoral student Clara Kindler-Mathôt participated in the research school on the topic of interaction research in the context of methodological and technical innovations at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim.

Doctoral student Jeanette-Christine Bauer participated with a presentation in the 8th Innsbruck Winter School "Potenziale der Angewandten Linguistik" Alles Theater!? Performativität und Inszenierung in kommunikativen Gattungen.

With this symposium, researchers worldwide are honouring the great scholar of gesture, speech and sign language research Adam Kendon, who died in 2022.

Full funding of the anthology "Un/reale Interaktionsräume. Formen sozialer Ordnung im Spektrum medienspezifischer Interaktion" in the Open Library Community Media Studies series of transcript Verlag (Open Access).

The German-Polish research project Multimodal Stancetaking: Expressive Movement and Affective Stance was invited to present results on linguistic-gestural forms of affective positioning in the context of cognitive linguistic research.

In order to present for discussion initial findings from the German-Polish research project in the context of linguistic research on multimodal positioning in political discourse Cornelia Müller organised a section at the largest international conference on language use research (IPrA).

The first meeting of all doctoral students and lecturers in the Department of Linguistics was a great success and will be continued next year.

Affective Stancetaking in Political Speeches. Some Insights in Processes of Multimodal Meaning-making in Media Specific Contexts.

By invitation of Prof. Salvador Pons Bordería, Catedrático de Lengua Española, Clara Kindler and Jana Junge presented.