The Relations between Charles Goodwin’s Interactional Linguistics and Semiotics: Some Reflections on Multimodality and on the Diagram in Scientific Discourse

This text addresses the connection between the work of Charles Goodwin in interactional linguistics and contemporary semiotics, notably that of the structuralist Paris School, known today as Greimasian and post-Greimasian semiotics. The latter constitutes scholarship having further developed some great distinctions formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure,
such as the one between langue and parole, in the study of multimodality (relations between natural and nonverbal languages). However, Goodwin’s texts consider not only Saussure’s structuralist semiology but also another semiotics, that is, the American cognitive Peircean tradition, specifically regarding the topic of diagrammatic reasoning in multimodal discourse. This article seeks to discuss these twosemiotic approaches that I consider
as a semiotic foundation of Goodwin’s work, helping himto study the creativity at play in multimodal languages and in scientific diagrammatic devices. I will first return to Goodwin’s contributions in order to reformulate the question of the relations between verbal, visual, and gestural languages in his notational system (transcription of exchanges). Second, I will examine the case of the dynamics of inscriptions in science, raising the issue of the diagram.
Third, I will explore the points of encounter between Goodwin’s conception of the substrate of interactions and Jacques Fontanille’s enunciative praxis, in order to consider the dynamic relationship between sedimentation and transformation in social and scientific practices.