Situated Discourse and Multimodal Studies: Significance, Theory and Methodology

Real-life situated discourse is the most fundamental form of human interaction and it is constructed in the experiencing process of the Experiencer with the help of human multimodal sensory organs. In this real-life situated discourse, the Experiencer’s Total Saturated Experience and Situated Cognition are closely related. For a more profound understanding on situated discourse, we suggest taking Simulative Modeling and Multimodal Corpus Linguistics as the methodology and Situated Cognition as the theoretical framework, which enables the study to approach the Total Saturated Signification in situated discourse. This paper presents an introduction to multimodal studies on situated discourse, and offers the agenda for future research, including: language and human action, revisit to classic issues in Pragmatics, linguistic phenomena in special groups of people, protection of endangered languages and multimodal rhetoric analysis, etc.. All these issues are believed to be relevant to human cognition and linguistic competence, and thus extend the scope of language study and will grow into a promising research field with good theoretical and applied significance.