37.3301, Confs: Workshop at ICHoLS 17 - The 'Embodied Turn' in the Language Sciences: Origins, Transfers, and Continuities (Brazil)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3301. Wed Oct 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3301, Confs: Workshop at ICHoLS 17 - The 'Embodied Turn' in the Language Sciences: Origins, Transfers, and Continuities (Brazil)

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Date: 11-Oct-2026
From: Schröder, Ulrike [uschr400 at gmail.com]
Subject: Workshop at ICHoLS 17 - The 'Embodied Turn' in the Language Sciences: Origins, Transfers, and Continuities


Workshop at ICHoLS 17 - The 'Embodied Turn' in the Language Sciences:
Origins, Transfers, and Continuities
Short Title: ICHoLS XVII
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 at 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.



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