A Study of the Interactional Functions of Tag Questions in Jordanian Dialects in Irbid City from a Multimodal Perspective (working title)

The past few years have witnessed a noticeable increase of interest in the study of the role of multimodal resources in meaning-making and action-formation in face-to-face communication. However, little attention has been given to the multimodal aspects of natural Jordanian conversation, which would make this doctoral project the first to address both multimodality and tag questions as related to each other in one study. For this reason, I intend to reveal the interactional tasks performed by tag questions through a combination of linguistic structures, prosodic and visual features in spontaneous Jordanian conversation by adopting the approaches of Conversation Analysis CA and interactional linguistics IL within the framework of multimodal interaction. This study will also observe some of the significant variations in the forms and uses of tag questions between the Fallahi, Urban and Horani Jordanian Dialects.

The corpus of study consists of transcribed audio and video recordings of casual face-to-face conversations of 24 university students in Irbid City. The data will be transcribed using CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis) program. The visual body movements, including gesture, gaze, body posture, etc., will be transcribed based on the conventions developed by Mondada (2018). The reason why I will be using both the Conversation Analysis CA and Interactional Linguistics IL approaches is that CA will ensure that the analyses of the functions of tag questions will be based on the recipient’s orientation and will help to show that tag questions may serve as turn-constructional units. On the other hand, IL will be employed to analyse the joint role of the target semiotic modes in the production of different forms and functions of tag questions. The prosodic and visual features will be analysed using the following programs: Praat, which will be used to perform acoustic analysis of speech (i.e., to analyse the pitch contour and to show the duration of the sound) and ELAN, which will be used to analyse and annotate the nonverbal behaviours in the video recordings.

Short biography

Juman Al-qaoud (Amman, Jordan, 1993) received a merit scholarship to study Applied Linguistics at Jordan University of Science and Technology, where she graduated in January 2019 with a master’s thesis on authorship verification and idiolects in online opinion articles. During her master’s study, she worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the same university. Since October 2021, she is a DAAD scholarship holder and her PhD project on multimodality and tag questions in Jordanian dialects is supervised by Prof. Anna Bonifazi. Since April 2022 she is a collegiate member within the a.r.t.e.s Integrated Track. Her research interests include pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, multimodal communication, and computational linguistics.

Email: jalqaoudsmail.uni-koeln.de

Website:

https://ifl.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/diskurslinguistik/personen/juman-al-qaoud-ma

Publications

Al-Khatib, M. and Al-qaoud, J., 2020. Authorship verification of opinion articles in online newspapers using the idiolect of author: a comparative study. Information, Communication & Society, 24(11), pp.1603-1621.