In this paper, we take a Construction Grammar approach to Du Bois' concept of resonance activation. We suggest that the structural mapping relations between juxtaposed utterances in discourse, described in terms of diagraphs in dialogic syntax, can acquire the status of ad hoc constructions or locally entrenched form-meaning pairings within the boundaries of an ongoing conversation. We argue that the local emergence of these ad hoc constructions involves the same cognitive mechanism described for the abstraction of conventional grammatical constructions from usage patterns. Accordingly, we propose to broaden the scope of Construction Grammar to include not only symbolic units that are conventionalized in a larger speech community, but also a dimension of online syntax, i.e. the emergence of grammatical patterns at the micro-level of a single conversation. Drawing on dialogic data from political talk shows and parliamentary debates, we illustrate the spectrum of these ad hoc constructional routines and show their local productivity, which we take as an indication of their (micro-)entrenchment within a given conversation.

This paper presents a corpus study on the role of gaze for overlap resolution in German and Dutch triadic interactions. The focus is on overlap due to a simultaneous start by two speakers with one speaker abandoning her TCU before reaching a point of completion. The gaze behaviours of all three participants in the conversations were recorded with mobile eye tracking glasses. The analysis of the eye tracking data reveals the following gaze patterns: speakers who prevail in the competition for the turn space use gaze aversion away from the competing speaker as both a turn-holding and turn-yielding strategy. Withdrawing speakers, in turn, maintain gaze at the co-speaker or direct their gaze at her during overlap. Third participants often single out the later prevailing speaker and either keep looking at her or shift gaze to her during the overlap phase.

Usage-based theories hold that the sole resource for language users’ linguistic systems is language use (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000; Langacker, 1988; Tomasello, 1999, 2003). Researchers working in the usage-based paradigm, which is often equated with cognitive-functional linguistics (e.g., Ibbotson, 2013, Tomasello, 2003), seem to widely agree that the primary setting for language use is interaction, with spontaneous face-to-face interaction playing a primordial role (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Clark, 1996; Geeraerts & Cuyckens, 2007; Langacker, 2008; Oakley & Hougaard, 2008; Zlatev, 2014). It should, then, follow that usage-based models of language are not only compatible with evidence from communication research but also that they are intrinsically grounded in authentic, multi-party language use in all its diversity and complexities. This should be a logical consequence, as a usage-based understanding of language processing and human sense-making cannot be separated from the study of interaction. However, the overwhelming majority of the literature in Cognitive Linguistics (CL) does not deal with the analysis of dialogic data or with issues of interactional conceptualization. It is our firm belief that this is at odds with the interactional foundation of the usage-based hypothesis. Furthermore, we are convinced that an ‘interactional turn’ is not only essential to the credibility and further development of Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language and cognition as such. Rather, CL-inspired perspectives on interactional language use may provide insights that other, non-cognitive approaches to discourse and interaction are bound to overlook. To that aim, this special issue brings together four contributions that involve the analysis of interactional discourse phenomena by drawing on tools and methods from the broad field of Cognitive Linguistics.

The meaning-making process in face-to-face interaction relies on the integration of meaningful information being conveyed by speech as well as the tone of voice, facial expressions, hand and head gestures, body postures and movements (McNeill 1992;Kendon 2004). Hence, it is inherently multimodal. Usage-based linguistics attributes language use a fundamental role in linguistic theorizing by positing that the language system is grounded in and abstracted from (multimodal) language use. However, despite this inherent epistemological link, usage-based linguists have hitherto conceptualized language as a system of interconnected verbal, i. e. monomodal units, leaving nonverbal usage aspects and the question of their potential entrenchment as part of language largely out of the picture. This is -at least at first sight -surprising because the usage-based model of Construction Grammar (C × G) seems particularly well-equipped to unite the natural interest of linguists in the units that define language systems with the multimodality of language use. Constructions are conceptualized as holistic "conventionalized clusters of features (syntactic, prosodic, pragmatic, semantic, textual, etc.) that recur as further indivisible associations between form and meaning" (Fried 2015: 974). Given its conceptual openess to all levels of usage features, several studies have recently argued for the need to open up the current focus of C × G towards kinesic recurrences (Günthner &

This paper presents a case study on the English construction [all the way from X PREP Y] and its co-occurrence with manual gestures in multimodal television data from the Red Hen database.