moca3

Freiburg Sofa Talks

The Freiburg Sofa Talks Corpus (main author: S. Pfänder, coordination: I. Satti & E. Schumann) comprises 262 video recordings ranging from 10 to 50 minutes in duration. The corpus encompasses Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and Russian data, both from European and non-European countries and varieties.

In each video, a couple, two family members, or two close friends jointly recount events they have experienced together. The participants are mostly recorded in their home, where they feel comfortable sharing memories and stories with a third person (i.e., the addressed recipient). This person is the researcher, i.e., the person tasked with bringing the recording equipment to the participants’ home and informing them of the project. Importantly, the researcher is not a stranger to the couple but they are always either friends with the couple or related to them. The main camera is positioned next to the researcher, facing the other two participants. In some recordings, a second camera is set up in a way that captures the third person.

This conversational setting was designed to provide authentic opportunity spaces for range of narrative practices deployed to make shared experiences accessible for both a co-present recipient and an imagined audience. The participants choose freely what they talk about and how they do so. They self-manage the process of turn-taking, choosing topics and assigning participation roles. Moreover, they freely decide how and to what extent they address the third person, which leads to dynamic changes in the participation framework. As a result, the recordings encompass both storytelling activities and other forms of talk.

This corpus thus provides a large set of comparable videodata with complete visual access to the gestures and gaze of the participants on the sofa. The similar setup of the recordings across languages provides the basis for cross-linguistic studies and the size of the corpus allows for both qualitative and quantitative investigations of multimodal storytelling practices.

All participants have signed informed consent forms before producing the material.

Authors: D. Alcón (Freiburg; European Spanish data, corpus administration), F. D’Antoni (Leuven; Italian data), D. Dressel (Freiburg; French data), M. Garachana (Barcelona; Barcelona Spanish & Catalan data), M. Klatt (Freiburg, French data), S. Pfänder (Freiburg; project supervisor), I. Satti (Freiburg; American Spanish data, coordination), E. Schumann (Freiburg; German & French data, student accounts).

List of publications

Dankel, P. & Satti, I. (2019). Multimodale Listen. Form und Funktion körperlicher Ressourcen in Aufzählungen in französischen, spanischen und italienischen Interaktionen. Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 70(1), 58–104. https://doi.org/10.1515/roja-2019-0003

Dressel, D. (2020). Multimodal word searches in collaborative storytelling: On the local mobilization and negotiation of coparticipation. Journal of Pragmatics, 170, 37–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.08.010

Dressel, D. (forthcoming). Turn-taking in collaborative storytelling. ‘Et puis après’ (‘and then after that’) as a resource for resuming a telling-in-progress and negotiating tellership between story episodes. Linguistik Online.

Dressel, D. & Teixeira Kalkhoff, Alexander (2019): Co-constructing utterances in face-to-face-interaction. A multimodal analysis of collaborative completions in spoken Spanish. Social Interaction. Video-based studies of human sociality, 2(2). DOI:10.7146/si.v2i2.116021

Dressel, D., Dankel, P. & Teixeira Kalkhoff, A. (in press). What can What can collaboratively produced lists tell us about constructions? A multimodal analysis of co-constructed enumeration practices in spoken Spanish. In: Wiesinger, E. & Hennecke, I. Constructions in Spanish. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Dressel, D. & Satti, I. (2021). Embodied Coparticipation Practices in Collaborative Storytelling. Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift Zur Verbalen Interaktion, 22, 54–86.

Pfänder, S., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2019). Turn-sharing revisited: An exploration of simultaneous speech in interactions between couples. Journal of Pragmatics, 147, 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.05.010

Satti, I. (forthcoming). When it’s “now or never”. Multimodal practices for managing opportunities to initiate other-repair in collaborative storytelling. Narrative Inquiry.

Satti, I. & Soto Rodríguez, M. (2021a). La mirada y los recursos lingüísticos en contacto: Estrategias multimodales en la narración colaborativa en español y en quechua. Dinámicas lingüísticas de las situaciones de contacto, edited by Azucena Palacios and María Sanchez Paraíso, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 139-162. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701364-007

Satti, I., & Soto Rodríguez, M. (2021b). Multimodalidad y gramática en contacto: Prácticas para interrumpir una narración colaborativa en español y en quechua. In S. Sánchez Moreano & É. Blestel (Eds.), Prácticas lingüísticas heterogéneas: Nuevas perspectivas para el estudio del español en contacto con lenguas amerindias (pp. 149–180). Language Science Press.

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