Multimodal functional-notional concordancing

This chapter reports on the latest theoretical and technical innovations which have taken place in the field of multimodal corpus linguistics (Baldry and Thibault 2001, 2006a, 2006b, forthcoming) and shows how they can be applied to spoken texts. In particular, the paper suggests how the online multimodal concordancer MCA (Baldry 2005) can be used to create, annotate and concordance spoken corpora in terms of functions and notions (van Ek and Trim 1998a, 1998b, 2001), and illustrates the kind of informa- tion the concordances and their associated film clips provide. In so doing, the paper introduces the multimodal functional-notional concordancing technique (Coccetta 2008b), which is based on the notional-functional tradition (e.g. Wilkins 1976), and presents two multimodal data-driven-learning activities which show how established theory and new tools can be combined to create a novel approach to the analysis of spoken texts and enhance language learning