Content area
The article concerns the communication issues in two aspects: а) a classical conversation analysis of interaction process; b) the category of multimodality which gives a new interpretation of communication and reveals new communication units and their functioning in mass media discourse. Multiple theoretical models of the person's speech behavior in the media political discourse space are developed and tested on video footage which let study complex microunits of interaction including verbal and nonverbal components which are called multimodal signs. The interactional space and interactional ensemble concepts are the key ones in considering communication substructures. Two types of interaction space of political talk show are revealed: 1) primary, formed by all the people present in the television studio, including the audience, participants of a talk show – guests, the moderator, the camera man and other people in the recording studio; all of them form certain body-spatial constellations; 2) secondary, formed by a television camera for people who are not currently in the studio and "quasi" participate in the discussion of the problem. A camera-significant generating primary interaction space creates interaction dyads, triads and larger units which include speech, sign and corporal communication modules, i.e. body-spatial constellations. Interactional space is ordered by inter- and intrapersonal connections, which represent the process of coordination, where verbal activity of communicants is necessarily accompanied by simultaneous-reflexive unemphasized actions with nonverbal character. The multimodal perspective of interaction process study, being a type of conversation analysis, does not just follow the conversation analysis method but also changes the research aspects of communication as a social action, reveals new concepts in discourse construction of the social world.