Multimodal (di)stance in irony in face-to-face interaction

Although stance-taking as a socially contextualized and recognized interpersonal phenomenon has received substantial attention in different subfields of linguistics, its multimodal realization in real-life interaction still remains largely unexplored. The proposed research project zooms in on the interplay of different semiotic resources, including manual gestures and signs, posture, facial expressions, acoustic experience, touch and eye gaze in complex stance-taking acts (stance-stacking), which may be realized simultaneously and/or sequentially, within or across speakers engaged in interaction (co-stacking). Irony qualifies as a case par excellence for the study of complex stance, as speakers may express different stances at the different layers involved. Interactionally grounded accounts of irony and sarcasm have focused strongly on the construction and negotiation of complex layered gestalts, using insights from Joint Action Theory (Clark 1996, 2006), Mental Spaces Theory (Kihara 2005; Ritchie 2006; Brône 2008, 2012; Tobin 2016), Blending Theory (Coulson 2005; Dancygier & Sweetser 2014), among others. In most cases, these accounts provide a model for the pretence that speakers are engaged in when jointly construing ironic utterances in interaction, as well as for the affective or evaluative power of such utterances (Barnden 2017). In the proposed project, we will zoom in on the much less studied question how speakers interactionally ground and monitor such sequences of joint pretence, using different semiotic resources (see Brône & Oben, in prep.), zooming in on the role of gesture, facial expressions and eye gaze, and how they interact in construing and negotiating (di)stance in irony in interaction.