A multimodal approach to reformulation: contrastive study of French and French Belgian Sign Language through the productions of speakers, signers and interpreters

Abstract

Reformulation is remarkably frequent in discourse and has been the subject of much work in spoken languages, both on written and oral data. Because of its metalinguistic nature, combined with its general aim of clarifying an expression, the act of reformulation offers a window to the way speakers process and adjust their expression in discourse. However, to date, the study of reformulation has hardly taken into account the now increasingly recognized multimodal and semiotically composite nature of language. This study aims to revisit the notion of reformulation from a multimodal perspective by comparing the use and semiotic composition of reformulations in the discourse of speakers and signers, as well as in the productions of interpreters. In doing so, we lay the foundations for a comparative study of discourse in signed and spoken language that accounts for the multimodality and semiotic complexity of language practices in different human ecologies.