Pekarek Doehler, Keevallik, Li have edited a special issue at Frontiers in Communication on The Grammar-Body Interface, with an introduction here.
Abstract:
Human communication rests on a complex ecology of multiple resources that are orchestrated for collaborative meaning-making and coordination of social action. The aim of this Research Topic is to analyze how grammar and the body interface in naturally occurring interaction. The contributions draw on conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to demonstrate how verbal and bodily conduct is intricately intertwined: they mutually elaborate each other and are variably synchronized to achieve communicative goals. A distinctive feature of the studies is that they offer collection-based analyses of a range of grammar-body assemblies: recurrent simultaneous or successive combinations of grammatical constructions and bodily behavior. Taken together, they offer a rich demonstration of how analyzing language use in its full local ecology has the potential of deepening, if not revising, our very understanding of language. In this editorial, we will organize the studies into four sections as described below.