Thomas Hoffmann (Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) visited Frankfurt on June 12 to give a talk on Football Chants as Multimodal Constructions.

Thomas motivated the concept of multimodal constructions, which leads to a considerable extension of what should be described within a linguistic theory. Thomas has just come back from the International Conference on Multimodal Communication in Osnabrück, so we were priviledged to learn about current developments in this domain.

In the main part of his talk, Thomas illustrated the concept of multimodal constructions with English football chants. He identified some of them as “meso-constructions”, i.e., as considerably abstract and partly productive patterns. The constructional status of these chants was further motivated by their pragmatic and social functions.

Some references

• Hoffmann, Thomas. 2015. “Cognitive Sociolinguistic Aspects of
  Football Chants: The Role of Social and Physical Context in
  Usage-based Construction Grammar”. Zeitschrift für Anglistik
  und Amerikanistik 63(3): 273–294.
• Hoffmann, Thomas. 2017. “Multimodal Constructs – Multimodal
  Constructions? The Role of Constructions in the Working
  Memory”. Linguistics Vanguard 3(1).
• Hoffmann, Thomas and Alexander Bergs. 2015. “Are you a
  construction in disguise? – Soziale und physische
  Kontexteigenschaften von Fußballgesangskonstruktionen”. In: A.
  Ziem und Alexander Lasch, eds. Konstruktionsgrammatik IV:
  Konstruktionen als soziale Konventionen und kognitive Routinen.
  Tubingen: Stauffenburg.

Links

• Thomas Hoffmann’s homepage
• Abstract of the talk
• Homepage of the International Conference on Multimodal Communication, Osnabrück, June 9-11.