36.1207, Confs: ICCA 2026 Panel: Multimodal forward-communication (Canada)

Sat Apr 12 00:05:05 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1207. Sat Apr 12 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1207, Confs: ICCA 2026 Panel: Multimodal forward-communication (Canada)

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Date: 08-Apr-2025
From: Junfei Hu [junfei.hu at uclouvain.be]
Subject: ICCA 2026 Panel: Multimodal forward-communication

ICCA 2026 Panel: Multimodal forward-communication
Short Title: Panel at ICCA 2026
Theme: Multimodal forward-communication

Date: 23-Jun-2026 - 29-Jun-2026
Location: Edmonton, Canada
Contact: Junfei Hu
Contact Email: junfei.hu at uclouvain.be
Meeting URL: https://icca2026.org/

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics;
Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Jun-2025

Panel title: Multimodal forward-communication
Organisers of the panel: Junfei Hu (UCLouvain), Geert Brône (KU
Leuven) & Liesbeth Degand (UCLouvain)
Background and questions of the panel
In face-to-face conversation, interlocutors coordinate both verbal
(lexical choices, syntactic structures, prosody) and non-verbal
(posture, gestures, eye gaze, facial expressions) resources to perform
communicative actions (Holler & Levinson, 2019). Notably, before the
emergence of the utterance that verbally expresses a communicative
action, the action itself is often prefigured through other multimodal
linguistic resources—sometimes in a distinctly observable manner and
at other times in ways that can hardly be consciously pinned down
(Schegloff, 1984; Streeck, 2009). We refer to this prefigurative
phenomenon as “forward-communication.” Since human communication is
inherently multimodal, a multimodal perspective is essential for
exploring and understanding this phenomenon.
The panel aims to advance our understanding of how multimodal channels
interact during language production. It also provides more concrete
and detailed evidence on the role of multimodal information in
language comprehension. For instance, earlier communicative actions
can allow interlocutors to prepare their responses in advance,
potentially leading to faster response times (Deppermann et al., 2021;
Levinson & Torreira, 2015). Additionally, this panel has implications
for language variation and evolution. In interaction, interlocutors
generally aim to convey their communicative intentions as early as
possible (Levinson, 2013). While different languages may employ
distinct strategies, the motivation for forward-communication and the
interaction of multimodal information in this process contribute to
shaping language and may even act as a driving force for its evolution
(Clifton & Carreiras, 2013; Heesen & Fröhlich, 2022).
The following questions, among others, will be explored and discussed:
 1.     To what extent does multimodal forward-communication
facilitate interaction? For example, does it enhance prediction (or
projection), enable smoother turn-taking, or help prevent
interruptions?
 2.     How are multimodal resources temporally coordinated with
regard to forward-communication?
 3.     How does multimodal forward-communication develop within a
given temporal scope—for example, from the initiation to the
conclusion of a conversation?
 4.     Are there universal or routinized forms of multimodal
forward-communication within specific communities, such as different
cultures or contexts (e.g., doctor-patient communication,
teacher-student communication), or different language groups (e.g.,
children, L2 learners), or in human communication at large?
 5.     What kinds of methods or technologies can be applied to the
investigation of forward-communicating?
 6.     What kind of matrix (e.g., turn, sequence, or other
structures) can be relied upon to examine multimodal
forward-communication?
 7.     How can linguistic research on forward-communication interact
with and inspire other disciplines or studies? For example, how might
findings from human-human communication contribute to advancements in
human-machine communication?
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION：
Please send the abstract along with your name, contact and affiliation
no later than June 15th 2025, to junfei.hu at uclouvain.be.
FYI: Although your submission is part of a panel proposal, it will be
considered independently. Therefore, when preparing your abstract,
please follow the guidelines for individual submissions:
Individual paper submissions should include:
 (1) A title
 (2) An extended abstract (as a Word document, no more that 700 words,
excluding references.)
Extended abstracts should provide a rationale for the study and
clearly state the main analytic point(s) or argument(s) of the paper.
For empirical research, please include a data excerpt with a brief
analysis.
 (3) Three to five keywords

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