Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Most people in the world speak more than one language, making bilingualism the norm rather than the exception. Furthermore, speakers generally also move their hands – they gesture – in coordination with speech and language in nontrivial ways. Bilingualism and multimodality should thus be on research agendas focused on the nature of linguistic systems and language use in context, yet they are often overlooked. Conversely, research and theorizing on bilingualism and multimodality is often based on Western-European, standardized languages, and little is known about other linguistic contexts. This paper makes the point that language documentation data has the potential to inform theoretical and empirical studies of linguistics, bilingualism and multimodality in entirely new ways, and, conversely, that documentation work would benefit from taking the bilingual and multimodal nature of its data into account.
Author: Marianne Gullberg
Institution: Lund University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1886626424