A construção metafórica de palavras-chave para a descrição de experiências interculturais: Um estudo a partir da análise da conversa multimodal

Abstract

Recently, an interface between cognitive linguistics and conversation analysis has emerged mainly as a result of two basic insights: On the one hand, there is a growing demand between cognitive linguistics to put their theoretical assumptions and presuppositions onto the solid empirical grounds of language use; on the other hand, conversation analysts also have become increasingly aware of the fact that they no longer can abstain from cognitive phenomena, especially when taking into account that the conversational ‘machinery’, as Sacks (1995, p. 169) called it, does not function all by itself. Rather, the participants with their individual, social, and cultural knowledge interactively construct the communicative patterns under investigation. Hence, the pivotal question which arises from the two areas’ reciprocal relationship concerns precisely the cognitive aspects of the co-constructed meaning-in-context. Currently, researchers in the field of metaphoric gesture and cognition account for this new interface which departs from a phenomenological-anthropological, embodied, as well as praxeological point of view. This includes the assumption that gestural acts are rather conceived as a result of distributed cognition and situated coordination with others than as pre-ordained psychological structures determining language and gesture in a unidirectional way, as it was proposed by the first generation of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Nevertheless, it is still hard to find the examination of real interacion from an ‘embodied’ and multimodal perspective in empirical practice, concurrently maintaining the operational framework of conversation analysis which implies drawing attention simultaneously also to prosodic cues. The following analysis aims at contributing to the dialogue between the two disciplines by analysing how exchange students conceptualize their experiences within their host culture in terms of key metaphors displayed on multimodal levels and serving as triggers for the construction of alterity.