ICCA 2026 Panel: Multimodal forward-communication

Date: 23-Jun-2026 - 29-Jun-2026
Location: Edmonton, Canada
Contact: Junfei Hu
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Jun-2025

Organisers of the panel: Junfei Hu (UCLouvain), Geert Brône (KU Leuven) & Liesbeth Degand (UCLouvain)

[If you would like to contribute your abstract but require an extension, please contact Dr. Junfei Hu directly.]

Background and questions of the panel:
In face-to-face conversation, interlocutors coordinate both verbal (lexical choices, syntactic structures, prosody) and non-verbal (posture, gestures, eye gaze, facial expressions) resources to perform communicative actions (Holler & Levinson, 2019). Notably, before the emergence of the utterance that verbally expresses a communicative action, the action itself is often prefigured through other multimodal linguistic resources—sometimes in a distinctly observable manner and at other times in ways that can hardly be consciously pinned down (Schegloff, 1984; Streeck, 2009). We refer to this prefigurative phenomenon as “forward-communication.” Since human communication is inherently multimodal, a multimodal perspective is essential for exploring and understanding this phenomenon.

The panel aims to advance our understanding of how multimodal channels interact during language production. It also provides more concrete and detailed evidence on the role of multimodal information in language comprehension. For instance, earlier communicative actions can allow interlocutors to prepare their responses in advance, potentially leading to faster response times (Deppermann et al., 2021; Levinson & Torreira, 2015). Additionally, this panel has implications for language variation and evolution. In interaction, interlocutors generally aim to convey their communicative intentions as early as possible (Levinson, 2013). While different languages may employ distinct strategies, the motivation for forward-communication and the interaction of multimodal information in this process contribute to shaping language and may even act as a driving force for its evolution (Clifton & Carreiras, 2013; Heesen & Fröhlich, 2022).

The following questions, among others, will be explored and discussed:
1. To what extent does multimodal forward-communication facilitate interaction? For example, does it enhance prediction (or projection), enable smoother turn-taking, or help prevent interruptions?
2. How are multimodal resources temporally coordinated with regard to forward-communication?
3. How does multimodal forward-communication develop within a given temporal scope—for example, from the initiation to the conclusion of a conversation?
4. Are there universal or routinized forms of multimodal forward-communication within specific communities, such as different cultures or contexts (e.g., doctor-patient communication, teacher-student communication), or different language groups (e.g., children, L2 learners), or in human communication at large?
5. What kinds of methods or technologies can be applied to the investigation of forward-communicating?
6. What kind of matrix (e.g., turn, sequence, or other structures) can be relied upon to examine multimodal forward-communication?
7. How can linguistic research on forward-communication interact with and inspire other disciplines or studies? For example, how might findings from human-human communication contribute to advancements in human-machine communication?

Abstract Submission:
Please send the abstract along with your name, contact and affiliation no later than June 15th 2025, to [email protected]. If you would like to contribute your abstract but require an extension, please contact Dr. Junfei Hu directly.

FYI: Although your submission is part of a panel proposal, it will be considered independently. Therefore, when preparing your abstract, please follow the guidelines for individual submissions:

Individual paper submissions should include:
(1) A title
(2) An extended abstract (as a Word document, no more that 700 words, excluding references.)
Extended abstracts should provide a rationale for the study and clearly state the main analytic point(s) or argument(s) of the paper. For empirical research, please include a data excerpt with a brief analysis.
(3) Three to five keywords