Grammar in Motion

with Pr. Jean-Rémi LAPAIRE, Université Bordeaux Montaigne

jean-remi.lapaire@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

Saturday 17/02/24, 10-12pm, Room 3105, Arts Block, TCD

We live our lives as social beings and have an irrepressible urge to interact with fellow humans while sharing our thoughts, feelings and judgements. It is grammar that makes both the interaction and the sharing possible. Grammar allows the conversion of bare thoughts, raw emotions and unarticulated world experience into brief utterances or complex sentences. This means that most of the cognitive or social events that take place during our lives end up being "grammaticized", i.e. transformed into spoken or written discourse. When speech is the chosen medium for expression, we unconsciously find ourselves gazing, moving, raising or lowering our voices. The sensing, moving and speaking body is thus instrumental in shaping, enacting and displaying meanings, simple or complex, lexical or grammatical.

In this workshop, we will set grammar in motion:

  • First, by establishing the dramatic, performative and interactional nature of grammar. It is grammar that makes social encounters possible and negotiable. It is grammar that we use to articulate our own thoughts and express our own desires, while “manipulating” other people’s ideas and social behaviour. Grammar is social action; grammar is empowerment: better be on the right rather than the wrong side of syntax if you want to stay in control of your own life.
  • Then, by scanning through the grammatical notions and processes that typically lend themselves to bodily expression. Thus, we will observe some of the motions that accompany negative and positive assertions, open and closed questions, and other processes. Time allowing, we will also look at the contribution of gesture to time reference, logical connection, comparison and quantification.
  • Finally, by exploring the poetic and imaginative potential of grammar.

Authentic language and movement material will be used throughout the workshop. We will discover simple strategies for choreographing useful and enjoyable "kinetic action" that helps learners understand and memorize grammatical constructions and mechanisms.

No expert knowledge of grammar or linguistics needed. No previous training in drama, dance or bodily expression required.

Jean-Rémi, LAPAIRE teaches cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, gesture semiotics, dance and performance theory at Université Bordeaux Montaigne (UBM), France. He has explored the role played by physical motion in grammar, abstract reasoning and social interaction: how the sensing, moving and cognizing body articulates and projects situated “social meanings”. His current research is centred on intersemiosis, intersemiotic translation and performance-based approaches to education. He has designed and tested new teaching and learning strategies in science and the arts– spoken, written, visual-kinaesthetic – which allow educators and students to engage more fully in observation and reasoning, His claim is that new spaces and strategies for reflection, creativity and analytic journaling can be set up and used successfully in such diverse fields as grammar, pragmatics, poetics, literature, discourse analysis… and astrophysics.