Own communication management in Nepali

This paper studies multimodality in Own Communication Management (OCM) focusing on how linguistic communication involves gestures in order to manage communication. OCM is a basic function in face-to-face communication and concerns how a speaker, on the basis of feedback needs to be able to plan his or her contributions and to modify earlier content or expressions. Thus OCM has two major functions namely “choice” and “change” both of which are realized with OCM related expressions and operations. This paper reports on studies of the expressions, and operations in both of the OCM functions and their distribution patterns. It also reports on interaction between OCM expressions, and between OCM operation and other communicative functions (Interactive Communication Management (ICM) and main message (MM)). Some of the main findings from the study are that about 66% of all OCM expressions involve gestures, and that the distribution of choice and change function of OCM is about 90% to 10%. The OCM expressions have multiple functions and interact with other communicative functions including ICM and the main message resulting in a complex system.