“Hey, look! This-is-im-por-tant!” Embodied focus during signing and speaking family dinners

Résumé En

How do parents and children pragmatically activate the semiotic resources at their disposal to negotiate, bring and maintain information to the foreground during the family dinner? The family dinner is a privileged occasion to study the orchestration of prosodic / pragmatic resources (Morgenstern et al. 2021). As a consequence, it is data where a multitude of resources are intertwined (Lombart 2021), with multiple factors expressing inter- and intra-individual variation. We investigate the "DinLang" recordings, which consist in a collection of family dinners in LSF and spoken French. The particularity of this corpus is to allow us to compare the resources activated in similar conditions for signing and speaking families. We are particularly interested in the prosodic (gestural) resources of signers and show how this can in turn shed light on the gestural resources used for the same pragmatic function in 'speakers'.We made an inventory of the prosodic resources used to bring information to the foreground of the conversation. We established the systematic and common characteristics of these resources across various situations and articulatory modalities. We pinpointed gestural prosodic markers as described in the SL literature (van der Kooij et al. 2006; Wilbur & Malaia 2018 a. o.), or associated with vocal focus, as described for spoken languages (Ferré, 2019; Graf, et al. 2002). In addition to those markers, we identified an intermodal "scansion" pattern that allows signers and speakers to stress the relevance of an announcement. All these observations support the unified and physiognomic approach to language (Cornejo & Musa, 2017): some parts or the whole body can be mobilized to realize a hyper-articulated prosodic pattern and to make the focused piece of information salient. Taking the gestural dimension of these phenomena in SLs into account allows us in turn to emphasize the multimodality of the resources available to hearing speakers.