Exploring the role of the body in communicating ironic stance

Abstract

Performing and understanding conversational irony requires a complex management of multiple viewpoints. To communicate and negotiate these intricate viewpoint shifts, speakers (and addressees) often use nonverbal means (e.g. gaze shifts, shrugs, shifts in body orientation, hand gestures, etc.) next to verbal viewpoint strategies. In the present paper we zoom in on the perspective of the speaker and try to describe and quantify bodily behavior in ironic utterances compared to non-ironic ones. To this end, we use data from a video-corpus of three-party interactions with participants wearing mobile eye-tracking devices that allow for precise eye gaze data. Our results show that speakers display more of the multimodal resources under scrutiny in ironic cases compared to non-ironic cases. More specifically, the involvement of bodily resources is mainly manifested in the use of laughter, head movements and body repositionings. We further show how those resources cluster into certain multimodal packages, and how the exact timing of the bodily behavior is relevant (i.e. the gaze behavior at the end of an ironic segment differs most notably from the end of a non-ironic one). Next to a quantitative analysis of the resources used in ironic talk in interaction, we also illustrate our findings with qualitative descriptions of relevant examples.

Mocking enactments: a case study of multimodal stance-stacking

“…The first corpus ( Brône and Oben, 2015 ) includes eight recordings of spontaneous interactions and eight recordings of brainstorming sessions, 2 in which participants wear head-mounted eye trackers (for an elaborate description of the corpus and setup, see Jehoul, 2019 ). The second corpus ( de Vries et al, n.d. ) contains 12 recordings of spontaneous triadic interactions between friends in a coffee bar and includes 3 camera perspectives on the faces and upper body of each participant. Participants received no instructions for these conversations.…”

“…Third, we examine the multimodal construction of these enactments and layers of stance. To achieve these aims, the study draws on corpora from three settings: (1) music instruction in Dutch ( Schrooten and Feyaerts, 2020 ), as well as German and English ( MuTh, 2021 ), (2) spontaneous face-to-face interactions among friends in Dutch ( Brône and Oben, 2015 ; de Vries et al, n.d. ), (3) narrations of past events from the corpus Flemish Sign Language (VGT, Van Herreweghe et al, 2015 ). The combination of three data sets allows for a broad and yet qualitative approach to mocking enactments in different communicative settings as well as languages in different modalities and from different communities.…”