Project launch seminar:
Speaking of art: Speaker positioning and interactional competence in L1/L2 Swedish
Thursday, October 16, 2025, room F3003 main building (Fabianinkatu 33).
The project “Speaking of art” investigates interactional and grammatical practices in conversations where lay speakers are discussing works of visual art. Central points of interest relate to how speakers express epistemic stances, assessments, and display affiliation. The project has collected a parallel corpus of L1 and L2 talk in Swedish which enables comparisons across these speaker profiles. The methodological framework is interactional linguistics and multimodal interaction analysis. In this launch seminar, the project’s researchers present their ongoing work, and our international collaborators will inspire us with presentations of their research interests. The project is funded by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland and placed at the University of Helsinki, Scandinavian languages. Click here to visit the project website.
Program
14.00 Jan Lindström: “I’m wondering” (how to launch a project?)
14.20 Sanna Heittola: Multimodality in word searches
14.40 Sara Rönnqvist: Explaining and arguing for favorite pieces of art
15.00-15.30 Coffee break
15.30 Yuval Geva & Yael Maschler: Social action, syntactic (un)integration, and embodiment: The multimodality of Hebrew concessive clauses
16.10 Leelo Keevallik: Epistemics and embodied knowledge in multimodal interaction
16.50-17.00 Short break
17.00 Simona Pekarek Doehler: The grammar-body interface in social interaction
17:45 Final discussion