The current article presents an overview of a domain which has become essential as an intersection of social sciences and the humanities: research of human communication in a real situation, among this the describing of language usage in a multimodal way including all kinds of means that are available to the collocutors or used by them. Also, a survey of previous research upon the use of language (e. g. in sociolinguistics) is provided. The communicative situation as a part of social activity includes, besides the spoken language of the communicators, also their bodily movements - glance, hand movement - and the situation as a whole. Currently research into language use serves as part of interdisciplinary investigations including conversation analysis, discourse analysis, research on multilingualism, anthropology, second language acquisition, micro sociology etc. The researches carried out by sociologists are often called conversation analysis, while the investigations made mainly by linguists and sociolinguists are referred to as discourse analysis. These two fields of research differ from each other both in their objectives and methods, and this is a point discussed in the present article. The main principles of studying speaking as a social activity are also viewed in the current article. The pioneers in the field as well as the founders of the method discussed and the guardians of its continuity are introduced. The ability to communicate and physical experience have been important for a human being all through the existence of the thinking mankind. We discover the space surrounding us by means of various movements. Perception, memory and language are parts of human cognition. The way we see the world, our conception of it takes shape in a concrete social culture. In communication it is possible to find three different types of information: info about cognition, motivation and the emotional condition of the speaker. The role of language is to play an active pragmatic part in the behaviour of a person. In a communicative situation we are using different abilities of communication, among which the authors of the article mention analogy. The concept of icon is looked at more closely. Hand gestures are important factors in forwarding meanings and intentions; they are discussed in the part of the article where the creating of the meaning is in focus. The concept of multimodal communication is defined; the advantages of using video data in the process of gathering and analysing the material are presented. As an example the authors provide analysis of a communicative situation where one interlocutor is a 17-year-old girl with the mosaic variant of the Patau syndrome. While doing the conversational analysis the authors considered different traditions, combining, e. g., the method of conversational analysis with the treatment of situation typical of discourse analysis. The communication patterns of the girl with the Patau syndrome underline very clearly the advantage of video material over dictaphone recordings. In their analysis the authors affirm that if one takes into consideration collaboration between the collocutors as well as the multimodal components, one will certainly get a better understanding of a communicative situation. The dynamic functioning of a communicative situation and our analysis of this process will give us more opportunities to understand each other on every level of communication.
