When thinking about the impact of embodiment on syntax, one of the first phenomena that linguists have noted is ellipsis (Bühler 1934). Ellipsis has been conceived of as the omission of obligatory syntactic arguments, if they are contextually available (Thomas 1979) because of spatial context, background knowledge, or prior discourse (the latter being called „analepsis“).
While this traditional approach starts from a supposedly well-formed standard syntax and accounts for deviations from it by reference to context, I take a praxeological approach. I study how argument structure is adapted to the availability of objects involved in practical activities because of perceptual salience, object manipulation, and the role that objects projectably play within routine sequences. Data come from request and instruction sequences in German.
Data analysis yields that object arguments are regularly omitted if they are mutually salient and involved in a course of joint action. Often, the distinction between analepsis and ellipsis is not feasible in these contexts (Deppermann 2025). Directional and temporal phrases, which are not considered as obligatory from a normative syntax perspective, are, however, obligatorily produced, because they are vital for coordinating joint action by specifying its temporal and spatial trajectories.

References:
Bühler, Karl (1934) Sprachtheorie. Jena.
Deppermann, Arnulf (2025): Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology. Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 35, 7-46.
Thomas, Andrew L. (1979) Ellipsis: The interplay of sentence structure and context. Lingua, 47, 1, 43-68.

Drawing on the methodology of multimodal conversation analysis, this study explores the relationship between grammar and body, focusing on conditional constructions in Japanese. The data was derived from a Japanese traditional dance workshop, in which a dance instructor teaches the handling of dance props and simple choreography. In the instruction of physical skills, such as dance, instructors frequently employ their bodies to demonstrate model movements to the students while providing verbal descriptions (Clark, 2016; Ehmer & Brône, 2021; Goffman, 1974). This study explores conditional constructions which the instructor employs as she demonstrates the body movements.
Japanese has a predicate-final (SOV), post-positional structure, which allows a sentence in a turn to undergo syntactic transformation near the end of the turn even after the production of a grammatically complete sentence (Hayashi, 2003; Tanaka, 2000). Unlike pre-positional languages like English, a conditional is not marked in the beginning of a clause; instead, a conjunctive suffix or particle, such as to ‘if,’ is placed after a verb and turns the part before the particle into a conditional clause.
The analysis reveals a close coordination between grammar, bodily conduct, and prosody. Through coordination, the syntactic transformation into a conditional construction contributes to the switching of an action from bodily demonstration to verbal explanation. It also serves to extend the turn and enables the instructor to present a key movement and its outcome. The study thus elucidates how the addition of a grammatical morpheme to construct a clause is intricately connected to body and activity.

It is acknowledged that human interaction is inherently multimodal. Social actions are accomplished not only through the use of language, but also through bodily-visual means (Kärkkäinen & Keisanen, 2012; Rossi, 2014). The present study explores the systematic working together of language and body in accomplishing directive actions in Mandarin interaction. A typological feature of Mandarin being a “pro-drop” language (Huang, 1989) is relevant to the use of language and body in directive actions. Both subject and object pronouns may “drop” from a clause in Mandarin, if they are understood from the context (Li & Thompson, 1981:656). The pronoun-drop or “pro-drop” in Mandarin is different from that in agreement-based inflectional languages in that Mandarin is an isolating language with no system of verb-subject or verb-object agreement (Huang, 1984). The prevalence of zero pronouns in Mandarin is highly relevant to the formation and ascription of directive actions in that the agent and beneficiary of a directive action may not be specified in the linguistic form, but indicated through bodily-visual means and inferred from the interactional contexts. Thus, TCUs with zero pronouns used to accomplish directive actions in Mandarin provide an ideal site to explore the systematic interplay between language and body in accomplishing social actions. An examination of 8 hours of naturalistic everyday Mandarin interactional data shows that participation framework, sequential position of a directive turn within a larger activity, and participants’ gaze and ongoing practical actions are relevant to the accomplishment of directive actions with TCUs/turns containing zero pronouns.

In this paper, we investigate the interplay between syntactic-auditory and bodily-visual resources in interaction. Previously, we have argued that bodily-visual displays can occupy the place of syntactic constituents, such as nouns and verbs, in turn-constructional units (Keevallik, 2018). Using multimodal interaction analysis, we now scrutinize 30 instances where utterances are completed with bodily-visual resources and then immediately re-completed syntactically. The data are in Swedish, English, French and Estonian, and come from opera rehearsals, scenography meetings, pilates and dance classes, and chats at a café. While earlier studies have shown that non-verbal resources often get disambiguated by verbal explanations (Schegloff, 1984; Couper-Kuhlen, 2012), we argue that the different modalities accomplish different interactional goals. While the bodily-visual completion directly displays, syntactic re-completions either describe the general gist of the display, or some aspect of it. They may also explain the rationale behind what is suggested through these multimodal structures. Finally, as they offer a verbal transition-relevance place, they increase the pressure of conditionally relevant replies. In sum, the paper reveals the intricate temporal intertwinements of syntax and the body in naturally occurring conversation at both professional and leisure encounters.

References
Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2012). On affectivity and preference in responses to rejection. Text & Talk, 32(4), 453-475.

Keevallik, L. (2018). What Does Embodied Interaction Tell Us About Grammar? ROLSI, 51(1), 1–21.

Schegloff, E. A. (1984). On some gestures' relation to talk. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.) Structures of Social Action (pp. 266-295). CUP.

In social interaction, speakers deploy various practices for extending their turns at talk by making syntactically simpler units structurally and semantically more complex. Such expanding practices may result in multi-unit turns or increments to turns. However, the systematics for how speakers manage, and recipients recognize, turn expansions across clausal units are not fully understood. Earlier research suggests that turn unit boundaries are relative to syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic cues (e.g. Ford & Thompson 1996; Ford et al. 2002; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), but much less is known about the role of speakers’ embodied resources in such contexts.

In our talk we seek to contribute to a better understanding of clause-combing and turn-expanding practices by attending to speakers’ gaze, posture and gesture at unit boundaries in the making of complex turns. At the same time, we are paying attention to unit boundary-relevant syntactic, prosodic, pragmatic and sequential features. Our analyses suggest, indeed, that expanding practices are multimodal, and that embodied cues are of central importance for signaling unit continuation or closure. The clausal expansions we are considering include complement, relative, temporal, causal, and conditional clauses. Through our account, we will contribute to current interests in continua of clausal integration and in the complexity of how grammar and body interface in social interaction, as well as in the multimodal nature of turn-transitional relevance places (see Kendrick et al. 2023). Our analyses are based on excerpts of video-recorded conversations in French, Hebrew, and Swedish.

Couper-Kuhlen, E., and Ono, T. (eds.) 2007. Turn continuation in cross-linguistic perspective. Pragmatics 17:4.
Ford, C. E., Fox, B. A. & Thompson, S. A. 2002. Constituency and the grammar of turn increments. In C. E. Ford, B. A. Fox, & S. A. Thompson (eds.), The Language of Turn and Sequence.
Ford, C. E., & Thompson, S. A. 1996). Interactional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational and pragmatics resources for the management of turns. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, & S. A. Thompson (eds.) Interaction and Grammar.
Kendrick K. H., Holler J., & Levinson S. C. 2023. Turn-taking in human face-to-face interaction is multimodal: Gaze direction and manual gestures aid the coordination of turn transitions. Phil Trans Rl Soc B, 378:1875.

This paper focuses on sequential relations that are established by the participants within social interaction at some distance, across some time, by means of recycling specific syntactic fragments even after several minutes have passed. The phenomenon includes a first attempt to initiate a turn, followed by its suspension due to a concurrent course of action; and then a second (as well as sometimes a third, fourth, etc.) attempt to re-initiate that turn, by means of the same syntactic format, when circumstances (and the material praxeological ecology) seem more favorable. This phenomenon reveals several key issues in interactional linguistics and CA: a) while studies of sequential and sequence organizations have privileged relations of contiguity, possibly expanded by pre- and post-sequences (Schegloff 2007), the phenomenon enables to demonstrate that sequential relations hold firm also across significant time spans (in form of distant continuation or distant backlinking, Schegloff 1996: 69, De Stefani & Horlacher 2008); b) recycling of lexico-syntactic material at some distance raises the question of the persistence of a syntactic, topical and actional project for a significant time, in its precise details; c) the suspension of the first projected turn continuation is provoked by some other course of action, often strongly implicating the bodies of the participants and the material ecology around them; d) this casts some light on how several courses of action are maintained and pursued together by the participants (see issues of multiactivity, Haddington et al. 2014, Mondada 2014), e) how speakers inspect the current praxeological ecology for identifying concurrent events that suspend their local projects, f) and how speakers constantly orient to local as well as overall structural emergent organizations (Mondada 2025). In the cases considered here, this ecology is characterized by several participation frameworks and several activities, which all have their own normative expectations and sequential projections, generating several lines of conduct that are visually, audibly and sensorily monitored and bodily achieved in parallel. What is remarkable, is that in this complex ecology, participants keep a very precise memory of their syntactic attempts. In turn this casts light on the strong interface between turns-at-talk and their syntax, body engagements, and multiple participation frameworks. The analyses are based on video-recording of interactions in a high-end French restaurant, characterized by the intertwined organizations of service interactions and interactions between customers at the table.

Perception imperatives such as “guarda” and “regarde” have been described as resources speakers use to orient the co-participant’s attention to some material object (Mondada 2012), but also to display a noticing of a (positively) assessable referent (Auer et al. 2024). They occur either as isolated units, or as TCU-initial elements with a variety of grammatically more or less dependent continuations, from simple NPs to entire clauses (e.g., for Italian, “guarda” + NP, “guarda che”/‘look how’ + adjective, etc.). Speakers of both French and Italian may use either simpler or more complex formats. These differences have been explained, e.g., as possibly manifesting aspectual variance (i.e., more or less urgency), as distinguishing between already ongoing and new action-projects (see German “guck” vs. “guck mal”, Laner 2022), or as the result of more or less pragmaticalization (with isolated ‘look’ depicted as discourse marker-like; Günthner 2017). In this contribution, we describe the different formats in which the perception imperatives “guarda”/“regarde” occur when used to reorient the recipient’s attention to some material object, in ordinary, institutional and service-related interaction. We show that their varying formats, temporal manifestations, and syntactic embeddedness are responsive to situated contingencies (i.e., the imperative construction is itself responsive to a witnessed lack of attention by the co-participant). We also examine the recipient’s embodied response to perception imperatives and demonstrate that it is sensitive to the grammatical format of the imperative construction. The analyses allow us to rediscuss the projective import of perception imperatives, and to reflect on gestalt-like “action packages”.