“Open and Closed People” as and in containers: Breaking Down Cultural Conceptualizations in Multimodal Communication

In Cultural Linguistics, cognition is conceived as being “distributed,” “emergent,” “dynamic,” and “embodied” since cognition is shaped by the body and its sensorimotor interaction within its cultural context (Sharifian 2015; Yu 2015). Despite this emphasis on embodiment, it is difficult to find studies hitherto in the field of Cultural Linguistics that draw attention to corpo-real actions as a mode of thinking, and approach co-speech gesture as an abstracted, yet fully embodied, mode of physical action, as well as an evolving set of embodied communicative practices (Streeck 2017, 2020). Based on videotaped and transcribed sequences originating from the Intercultural Communication in Multimodal Interactions – ICMI corpus (http://www.letras.ufmg.br/icmi/), this chapter aims at revealing how embodied cultural conceptualizations in multimodal interactions emerge in which students from different countries and in different situations co-construct their experiences abroad by verbally, prosodically, and gesturally metaphorizing people from other cultures as “open” and “closed” containers.