Strategic potential of multimodal interaction in media-political discourse

The article deals with multimodal specificity of interaction between participants of television talk shows, which is expressed in strategic potential of their verbal and nonverbal behavior. The television talk show as a screen genre of media-political discourse is an elaborate mental-medial product of a multimodal interaction. It is realized through media and aims to push for power to form public opinion. Multimodality means simultaneous use of semiotically different products by different sensory modalities in a single audiovisual space. A central condition of functioning of this multimodal interaction is the mechanism of mutual perception. As a "focus personality" politicians coordinate their behavior so that their opponents and viewers can perceive and interpret that adequately. That is why they always use mechanism of feedback for further sequential realization or correcting of their strategy in the multimodal interaction. The choice of strategy depends on the status-role dominance. As a "legitimate speaker" a participant of a TV show uses illustrator-gestures to duplicate and to intensify verbal information for the impact on other participants of the show. At the same time the other interactant takes a verbal break, but participates in the conversation using strategies of "adapting" or "forcing". For the implementation of the "adapting" strategy interactants use gestures which substitute verbal utterances and help to maintain contact, which is a signal of feedback. Such "communication" is without interference. This reaction of TV show participants helps the speaker to develop an initialized theme. There is no change of communicative roles. By the realization of the "forcing" strategy communicative partners use kinesic signs to segment the dialog, similarly to punctuation marks, to show their wish to enter the dialog and to interrupt the speaker in order to contradict or to ask a clarifying question. The discourse behavior of nonverbal communicators can extend the time of simultaneous multimodal communication without prejudice to the interaction, but the verbal overlap blocks the perception and the understanding of the information and generally stops the communication.

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