Open AccessConsidering the Nature of Multimodal Language from a Crosslinguistic Perspective
Author(s) -
Aslı Özyürek
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of cognition
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2514-4820
DOI - 10.5334/joc.165
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , linguistics , computer science , modalities , context (archaeology) , variation (astronomy) , semiotics , face (sociological concept) , sign language , psychology , sociology , artificial intelligence , paleontology , biology , social science , philosophy , physics , astrophysics
Language in its primary face-to-face context is multimodal (e.g., Holler and Levinson, 2019 ; Perniss, 2018). Thus, understanding how expressions in the vocal and visual modalities together contribute to our notions of language structure, use, processing, and transmission (i.e., acquisition, evolution, emergence) in different languages and cultures should be a fundamental goal of language sciences. This requires a new framework of language that brings together how arbitrary and non-arbitrary and motivated semiotic resources of language relate to each other. Current commentary evaluates such a proposal by Murgiano et al (2021) from a crosslinguistic perspective taking variation as well as systematicity in multimodal utterances into account.