Several members of ViCom attended the first Formal Linguistic Approaches to MultiModality (FLAMM) workshop, held at Trinity College Dublin on December 4–5, 2025. The workshop aimed to promote and advance the study of multimodality from a formal linguistic perspective by bringing together scholars interested in the formal analysis of visual and multimodal communication.
ViCom was strongly represented among the invited speakers. Cornelia Ebert (ViCom speaker, PI of project Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language) presented The dark side of linguistics. How to interpret depictions and iconic gestures in formal semantic frameworks?, while Philippe Schlenker (Mercator Fellow) gave the talk Viewpoints in Iconological Semantics: from Classifiers to Role Shift.
In addition, many ViCom members contributed talks to the program, reflecting the breadth and depth of current ViCom research in visual communication and multimodality:
· Lennart Fritzsche (Associate Member): More form, more degree: A shared mechanism for iconic intensification in gesture and speech
· Cornelia Loos (Project Exploring the limits of simultaneity: Encoding caused change-of-state events with classifier constructions in German Sign Language (DGS)): Iconicity to the rescue: non-linearization in resultative serial verb constructions (SVCs) in DGS
· Josiah Nii Ashie Neequaye (Associate member) & Vanessa Wing Yan Tsang (Associate member): A cross-modal comparison of event narratives: evidence from co-speech gesture in Gã and classifier constructions in HKSL
· Sebastian Walter (Project Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language): Not a totally crazy proposal: emblematic gestures as visual expressives
· Sebastian Walter (Project Visual and non-visual means of perspective taking in language) & Lennart Fritzsche (Associate member): Gesture modifications as event demonstrations: A formal analysis of iconic pro-speech gestures
Overall, FLAMM was a very fruitful event and particularly valuable for its strong theoretical focus on visual communication and multimodality. We warmly thank the workshop organizers Valentina Colasanti, Craig Sailor, Chiara Marchetiello, Maria Dimitropulou, and Giulia Villa for putting together such an inspiring program.
We are also very happy to announce that the next FLAMM workshop will take place in collaboration with ViCom in late summer 2027. Further information will follow soon.
For more details about the workshop, see the FLAMM website: https://sites.google.com/view/flammtrinity/home?authuser=0