Workshop at ICHoLS 17 – The ‘Embodied Turn’ in the Language Sciences: Origins, Transfers, and Continuities (Brazil)

Theme: Workshop/Panel: The ’embodied turn’ in the Language Sciences: Origins, transfers, and continuities

Date: 23-Aug-2027 – 27-Aug-2027
Location: Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, RJ, Brazil
Contact: Ulrike Schröder
Contact Email: uschr400@gmail.com
Meeting URL: https://ichols.org/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; History of Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 19-Nov-2026

The increasing attention devoted to bodily conduct, gesture, gaze, spatial organization, and other visible semiotic resources is often characterized as part of a recent “multimodal” or “embodied turn” in linguistics (Nevile 2015). From a historiographic perspective, however, this characterization raises broader questions: when, where, and under what disciplinary, epistemological, and technological conditions did the study of language and communication come to encompass the embodied organization of interaction? Approaches that conceptualize language use as situated, sequentially organized, and embodied do not form a linear progression toward a unified multimodal paradigm; rather, they emerge from heterogeneous intellectual traditions extending across disciplinary boundaries.

Developments in photography, phonography, and film during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created new possibilities for documenting communicative conduct and enabled speech to be examined alongside gesture, posture, gaze, bodily movement, and spatial organization. Efron’s (1941) cross-cultural investigation of Italian and Jewish gestural practices in New York and Bateson and Mead’s (1942) photographic analysis of Balinese social conduct exemplify early attempts to combine technological innovation with ethnographic and comparative inquiry. By the mid-twentieth century, scholars working across anthropology, linguistics, psychiatry, and communication research—including Ray Birdwhistell, Charles F. Hockett, Gregory Bateson, and Edward T. Hall—conceptualized communication as involving systematically organized relations among linguistic, bodily, spatial, and contextual phenomena. Such approaches challenged models privileging verbal messages or treating linguistic structure as separable from the embodied circumstances of its production and interpretation (McElvenny & Ploder 2021). These traditions subsequently intersected, directly or indirectly, with gesture studies, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and interactional linguistics (Goodwin 1979; McNeill 1992; Müller 1998; Kendon 2007; Streeck 2009; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018), although their conceptual and methodological relationships cannot be reduced to a single genealogy.

This thematic workshop aims to investigate the intellectual, institutional, technological, and methodological conditions under which embodied conduct became an object of inquiry within the language sciences. It addresses four interrelated questions:

1. What antecedents can be identified for contemporary approaches to embodied, situated, and interactionally organized language?
2. How did photography, phonography, film, and video transform the empirical objects and methods of linguistic inquiry?
3. How did concepts and methods circulate among linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, semiotics, and communication studies?
4. What epistemological convergences and tensions characterize traditions incorporating multimodality?

The workshop thus seeks to develop a differentiated historiography of embodied and multimodal approaches within the language sciences.