When the Body Belies the Words: Embodied Agency With darf/kann ich? (“May/Can I?”) in German

Abstract

Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action that is addressed by the turn before the recipient's response. We argue that through such embodied conduct, the speaker bodily enacts high agency, which is at odds with the low deontic stance they express through their darf/kann ich?-TCUs. In doing so, speakers presuppose that the intersubjective permissibility of the action is highly probable or even certain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the speaker's embodied action, joint perceptual salience of referents, and the projectability of the action addressed with darf/kann ich? allow for a lean syntactic design of darf/kann ich?-TCUs (i.e., pronominalization, object omission, and main verb omission). Our findings underscore the reflexive relationship between lean syntax, sequential organization and multimodal conduct.

Multimodal stance-taking – A systematic literature review

“…Sometimes the verbal and bodily-visual modality are described to have a contrastive relation, and the stance taken in the verbal modality is different from the one in the bodily-visual modality (e.g. Deppermann and Gubina, 2021). In the section Formfunction relations we will dig deeper into the possible relations between different articulators and resources at stake.…”

“…For the turn-final position, the potential for withholding information and potentially invoking other-completion after incomplete syntax is discussed (Ford et al, 2012;Li, 2021). There are also stance displays which can potentially occur at any of the three given points with reference to a participant's turn (Jehoul et al, 2017;Deppermann and Gubina, 2021). For instance, depending on the sequential order of permission-seeking and action completion, different deontic stances are expressed.…”

“…Epistemic access and rights are shaped by, for example, body positioning (Goodwin, 2007;Melander, 2012;Goodwin and Goodwin, 2012;Melander Bowden, 2019;Norén et al, 2021), gaze behavior (Haddington, 2006), and deictic gestures (Mondada, 2009). Deontics and agency can also be managed through embodied action, for instance, in presuming the intersubjectivity of the permissibility of actions (Deppermann and Gubina, 2021). Some articles explicitly mention a division of labor between speaker and addressee with regard to who initiates an expression of stance which can be taken up by another participant (Kaukomaa et al, 2015;Heller, 2021).…”