Pauline Madella, PhD

This blog is dedicated to my research activities, publications and reflections in relation to my areas of special interest and expertise: language and cognition, pragmatics, prosody & nonverbal communication, interlanguage and instructional pragmatics, the pragmatics of sarcasm, and the pragmatics of manipulation (forensic linguistics & corpus pragmatics).

See recent blog posts: A The Book Review (Autumn 2025), Hey June! (June 2025) Brisbane, here we come! (Feb. 2025), 2025 is here! (Jan. 2025), What’s Cooking! (July 2024), June 2024✨(June 2024) and 2024 sneak peeks (Feb. 2024).

New publication alert!

30/11/2023 Our paper Nonverbal Communication and Context: Multimodality in Interaction was published today with Cambridge Core, Cambridge University Press.

This paper highlights the major role of non-verbal ‘modes’ of communication (‘multi-modality’) in accounting for how meaning is achieved and explores in particular how the quasi-musical contours we impose on the words we say, as well as the movements of our face and hands that accompany speech, constrain the context and guide the hearer to our intended meaning. We argue that much existing work on multimodality remains rooted in a code model and show how adopting an inferential model – Relevance Theory – enables us to integrate multimodal behaviours more completely within a theory of utterance interpretation.

It was a pleasure working with two of my favourite humans and academics: Dr Tim Wharton – co-author, and Professor Jésus Romero-Trillo – editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context.

Citation: Madella, P. and Wharton, T. (2024) ‘Nonverbal Communication and Context: Multimodality in Interaction’, in Romero-Trillo, J. (ed.), The    Cambridge    Handbook    of     Language    and Context. Cambridge University Press, pp. 419-435.

New publication alert!

29/09/2023 My paper Relevance and multimodal prosody: implications for L2 teaching and learning was published today with Frontiers in Communication in the Relevance in Mind Research Topic.

In my paper, I discuss the relevance of contrastive stress as a multimodal phenomenon interepreted purely inferentially, by virtue of its interaction with co-speech gesture and other co-pointing bodily accompaniments (e.g. eye gaze, frown). The pragmatic dimension of prosody lies precisely in its close interaction and co-existence with gesture. Contrastive stress behaves much like a pointing gesture, and interpreting it in its multimodal context allows us to better perceive and demonstrate its pragmatic force. As I have been arguing (Madella 2021, Madella and Wharton 2023, Madella and Romero-Trillo 2019), this bears important implications for the teaching of prosodic pragmatics as well as the development of oral inferential abilities in the L2 user.

Citation: Madella, P. (2023) Relevance and multimodal prosody: implications for L2 teaching and learning. Frontiers Communication. 8:1181805. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2023.1181805.

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