Funktionen von Modalitätsinterdependenzen in professionellen Interaktionen

Abstract

This paper deals with multimodal interaction in professional settings. The question is: How do people use communicative resources to create and pass on knowledge cooperatively? The focus lies on functions of the interplay of multimodal communicative resources. The analyses presented are based on a case study: in a company, industrial process modelers interview employees about workflows, then develop a preliminary process model of the production process and afterwards a computer-generated final process model. In these situations, the participants combine complex resources such as speaking, writing, and visualizing (so-called modality interdependencies, MID). The article proposes a model for describing and analyzing the forms and functions of modality interdependencies.