Accomplishing choral and collectively performed multi-modal self-defence actions

Abstract

This article examines multi-modal self-defence actions in personal safety training classes for girls and women. The actions have linguistic and embodied components. An example is shouting “back off” at an imagined attacker while assuming a self-defensive stance position. An additional distinctive aspect of the phenomenon of interest is that it is done collectively as a multi-person party. Our work builds on and extends prior research in multimodal conversation analysis which has shown the ways language and bodily actions fit together. Using a collection of 200 cases drawn from more than 50 hours of video footage, two broad kinds of recurrent practices are described the support the class to achieve the collective, co-production of multi-modal self-defence actions. One is the projective, embodied syntactic structures instructors use to demonstrate the action and co-ordinate its execution. The other is the grammar of the verbal component that scaffolds the timing of physical techniques, especially ones where there is a combination of moves. By examining how linguistic and embodied components of multi-modal self-defence actions are brought together and done by multiple participants at the same time, we find empirical support for the innovative theoretical idea that syntax can be emergent and embodied rather than predominantly hierarchical and psycholinguistic. Data is in New Zealand English.