Experts from Spanish and international universities such as Orleans (France), Leuven (Belgium), Hong Kong Polytechnic (China), Stockholm (Sweden) and Princeton (USA) participated in the final workshop of project MultiNeg of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra. 

They have presented papers from specialties such as pragmatics, multimodality, gestural programs of study , corpus linguistics, analysis of speech, cognitive sciences and applied linguistics.

MultiNeg has as goal to detect and analyze consistent patterns of expression of disagreement in spontaneous conversation in Spanish, English and German, from a multimodal and cognitive perspective. "In addition to paying attention to the purely verbal component, we also integrate multimodal, non-verbal dimensions, such as gestures or prosody," says Inés Olza, principal investigator of project and organizer of meeting together with PhD student Javier Yániz.

New methods, data and applications

The workshop was the main closing activity of project and provided a forum for discussion on new methods, data and applications of this subject analysis. "We have concluded the importance of generating quality data in this context, which is sometimes difficult to achieve," he explains. 

He also adds that they have detected the need to integrate very diverse perspectives, "that go beyond the more traditional approaches that have analyzed the verbal and integrate these multimodal dimensions in the study of human interaction". 

Between 2019 and 2022, the project MultiNeg has been coordinated from the Multimodal Pragmatics Lab at the University of Navarra, with the support of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and FEDER/EU funds.