The role of emotions in relational work

While the role of emotions for communication has been recognized as important in numerous research disciplines, insights have rarely been exploited for linguistic research, nor have they been incorporated systematically in the traditional theories on relational work. This paper offers a literature review on emotion research for linguists and then focuses in particular on the creation of relational meaning within interpersonal pragmatics. Since emotional display is often signalled in gestures or facial expressions in addition to or in complement to linguistic evidence, we propose taking a multi-modal approach to the study of relationship construction. For this purpose we combine Clark’s (1996) work on the creation of meaning with a multi-modal tool-kit for analysis. The paper ends with an assessment on how this inclusion of emotional cues in our analysis of relational work improves our understanding of interpersonal pragmatics.