Research
Pragmatics
I studied linguistics during the time of the pragmatic turn, when a growing number of linguists, along with sociologists and anthropologists, realized that, to understand how languages work, we must understand how people use them in their daily social lives. Languages are resources for social action. The original ideas for this new way of thinking about language came from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and sociologists George Herbert Mead, and Erving Goffman, the methodology for analyzing talk as interaction that is most consistent with their thinking is conversation analysis: the basic unit of talk and interaction is a sequence of two social actions, related as initiation and response, and enacted by two different parties.
1980 Speech Acts in Interaction. A Critique of Searle. Discourse Processes, 3, 133-154.
Gesture
A great deal of my empirical research has focused on gestures of the hand—not conventional ones like the victory or peace sign, but gestures that we spontaneously make (and for the most part improvise) as we talk to one another about the world at hand. I have studied how people gesture in the contexts of many different activities and cultures, from German classrooms to rice-farms in the Philippines and auto-shops in Texas: what communicative functions hand gestures serve, how they are coordinated with speech and other communicative behaviors such as gaze, and how, generally, it is possible that meaning is made by movements of hands. My thinking about gesture is grounded in a commitment to body-mind-unity and owes much to the work of Adam Kendon and Charles Goodwin.
2009 Gesturecraft. The Manu-facture of Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2021 The emancipation of gestures. Interactional Linguistics, 1, 1, 90-122.
Multimodality
The interplay and intertwining of speech and gesture is an example of multimodality: different parts of our bodies and different methods and practices for sense-making and social coordination are involved when we engage in face-to-face communication. In my dissertation, I observed that we can read the ‘definition of the situation’ and the situated forces of speech acts from the participants’ posture configurations at the time. When I began to study gestures of the hands, the first thing I noticed was that at times when they gesture speakers look at their own hands. This look—an interaction between hand and eye—only occurs when the hands depict something (an object or event). It has proven to be a universal practice for alerting interlocutors to one’s gesture, while at the same time seeing one’s own meaning in one’s hand. Investigating the gestures of German businessmen during a negotiation it occurred to me that they also make symbolic sense with things: through the way they distractedly, though methodically manipulate objects on the table they symbolize social-structural properties of their interaction.
2017 C.Meyer, J.Streeck, & J.S. Jordan (eds.). Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction. Oxford University Press. 390 + xlix pp.
2011 Streeck, J.,C. Goodwin & C. LeBaron (eds.). Embodied Interaction. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xiii, 308 pp.
1997 C. LeBaron & J. Streeck. Built space and the interactional framing of experience during a murder interrogation. Human Studies, 20, 1-25.
1996 How to do things with things: Objets trouvés and symbolization. Human Studies, 19, 365-384.
Touch
Touch is our first and yet least investigated and understood mode of communicating and relating. Touch is different from other communication modalities because it is immediate, mutual, and direct: it manifestly effects sensations in others, independently of and prior to any understanding of ‘communicative intent’. Modes of touch, and the feelings attached to and generated by it, range from violation and violent control to the most tactful caresses of erotic play, with a largely unexplored plethora of forms of transitory and instrumental contact in between. Touch is more than communication, we need it for our very survival, as our isolation during the COVID pandemic has reminded us. How we connect, comfort, control, and understand one another through the skin are questions that researchers in this emerging field pursue. We have supported this research with an international symposium, The Importance of Touch during the Time of COVID, at the Moody College of Communication in 2002. A book is forthcoming.
2020 Meyer, C. & Streeck, J. Ambivalences of touch. An epilogue. Touch in Social Interaction. Touch, Language, and Body. Cekaite, A. & Mondada, L. (eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins. 311-326.
2020 Self-touch as sociality. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality. Vol. 3, Issue 2, 2020.
Interpersonal Communication with Other Species
All my research interests were triggered by some serendipitous encounter, this one by an encounter with a young cat. That we can build shared, reliable social worlds and deep relationships with members of other species, and they with us, is remarkable, and it speaks to a theme that runs through my work, that intersubjectivity (understanding one another’s minds by means of sign-mediated communication) is grounded in intercorporeality, the implicit, prelinguistic, practical resonance of living mindful bodies that inhabit and make a world together. The possibility of interspecies communication—between members of species who cannot possibly know one another’s minds or know what it is like to have the type of mind the other has—is a strong argument for this claim. Key to experiencing the fulness of interspecies worlds is recognition of their personhood, relating to each as an individual, not an exemplar of a species.
Language Evolution: Hip Hop and Beyond
Like all other woke linguists, I have realized that language is not some structure in the mind, some algorithm-like innate apparatus, but an ongoing product of social, culture-bound interaction that constantly changes and evolves. Enlightened by the new scientific consensus that grammar is the result of grammaticalization, we can find, and become fascinated by, grammaticalization phenomena in our own speech and aware of the transitory nature of linguistic norms. (Very deserving of our attention is America’s most frequent spoken word, like.)
As linguists discovered that, to understand how languages work and why they are structured the ways they are, we must investigate how it is spoken in social interaction, rappers reclaimed spoken language as a realm of music. Hip hop has given us a demonstration of how a new language emerges, expands, disperses, and differentiates in competitive musical-linguistic interaction. This new universal language is a language of practices, a set of methods for re-analyzing and re-configuring whatever language is spoken in a place. Studying the history of hip hop, we observe how artists have discovered layer after layer of language structure, from intonation to figures of speech, and mined it for its expressive potential.
2010 J. Streeck & D. Henderson. Das Handwerk des Hip-Hop. Freestyle als körperliche Praxis. (The handiwork of hip-hop. Freestyle as embodied performance). In C. Wulf and E. Fischer-Lichte (Eds.) Gesten: Inszenierung, Aufführung und Praxis. München: Wilhelm Fink. 180-206
2002 Hip-Hop-Identität. Soziale Welten und sprachliche Stile. Festschrift für Werner Kallmeyer. Eds. I. Keim & W. Schütte. Tübingen: Narr. 537-558.