About us

Founded at MSLU in 2013 to study the processes of face-to-face communication in terms of how they combine verbal and non-verbal (visual) modes of communication. When communicating with each other, communicators accompany speech with gestures, head movements, gaze and other physical actions with varying degrees of awareness. These actions have attracted increasing attention from linguists seeking to establish their communicative role in relation to linguistic facts.

The lab focuses on the study of such polymodal (verbal-nonverbal) complexes in argumentative and other types of discourse in different languages and cultures.

The spontaneous movements produced by speakers during speech reflect the way in which thought is formulated. We study such processes of ‘thinking for speaking’ on the basis of theoretical provisions of cognitive linguistics.

Analyses of verbal speech and gestures using frames, scripts, metaphors, metonymies and cultural models provide deeper insights into how thoughts are formed during communication with others. Detailed micro-analysis of video recordings of dialogic and monologic speech provides a point of departure for interpretive analysis of meaning-making and ‘meaning-exchange’ in face-to-face (in situ) communication. Particular attention is paid to how participants in communication react to various cognitive-rhetorical techniques, e.g., accepting or rejecting them, solidarising with or disagreeing with the speaker.

Our focus is primarily on natural communication in professional contexts: e.g., political debates, product presentations to clients, court hearings, etc. The data from such studies may be of use not only to those who study argumentative discourse, but also to a wider range of professionals outside the academic community, such as those in the consulting industry.

Research areas

• Multimodal construction of space and time in communication;
• Rhetorical and communicative practices in the discourse of native and foreign Russian speakers;
• Speech and oculomotor behaviour when performing tasks with different degrees of creativity;
• Semiotic means of visual attention control in modern media texts;
• Multimodal metaphor and metonymy in oral communication in different languages.