One major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action and interaction. Adopting the methodology of interactional linguistics, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of the three multimodal resources and the sequential environments in which they appear. It demonstrates that syntax, prosody and body movements not only converge but also diverge in...

This book meets the demands of scholars of Chinese linguistics as well as researchers on multimodality from a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective. It sheds new light on the traditional study of Chinese discourse and grammar. The volume brings together leading scholars working on the state-of-the-art research on this topic from all over the world, contributing to the understanding of the multimodal nature of human interaction at large.