The (limited) power of words in social behaviour

Following the origins of digital humanities ("literary and linguistic computing"), the text has always been central to it. However, when one gives a closer look at the words these text are made of, a whole world opens before our eyes: words are just the expression of what can hardly be expressed by words: human behaviour. The question then arises: can one truly understand and interpret thoughts, reflections, intensions based on words alone? And also: how much of all this can be traced back by following nonverbal events? Do gestures contribute to disambiguating words, or do they rather mask the unspoken context? And in any case: how objectively can we judge and react to a social interaction of competing verbal and nonverbal events?

Whereas the talk will address such questions based on data from a large corpus of multimodal communication, these and similar issues have their actuality in recent, far reaching social debates like "NeinHeisstNein" or "YesMeansYes".