This book provides an overview of different approaches to research on language and multimodality in social interactions. The author examines five strands - multimodal discourse analysis, multimodal corpus analysis, conversation analysis, gesture studies, and human multimodal communication - providing rationales and case studies to elucidate how each approach to language and multimodality has evolved, describing its theories, methodological frameworks, and positioning them in the field. The volume foregrounds how research on multimodal social interactions contributes both to theoretical development and to social problem-solving, and it will be of interest to a range of readers with backgrounds in fields including language and multimodal research, communication in social interaction, discourse and pragmatics, and applied linguistics.

Keiko Tsuchiya is a Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the School of Liberal Arts and International Studies at Yokohama City University, Japan. She received an MA in English Language Teaching from Nottingham Trent University, and a PhD in English Studies from Nottingham University, UK. She recently spent her sabbatical in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, as a research fellow of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour/Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Her expertise includes discourse studies, pragmatics, and multimodal analysis, and its application to social interactions, such as health communication.