Gesture as stance
| Author: | Edwards, Guy |
| Author 2: | Parton, Katharine |
| Abstract: | |
| Stance and stance-taking – the exchange and co-creation of (inter)subjective evaluation, attitude and opinion – are fundamental to the achievement of social interaction (Ochs 1996). This paper investigates stance-taking in embodied interaction. Stance-taking is a social action performed by a social actor that assigns socio-cultural value to an object of interest. In taking such a stance, a social actor evaluates objects, and simultaneously positions the self relative to others (Du Bois, 2007). Previous work on stance and embodied and non-verbal interaction has argued that non-verbal behaviour can achieve affiliation and alignment during narrative (Stivers 2008), perform affective stance (Goodwin 2007), and serve as a resource, albeit alongside speech, to achieve assessments (Haddington 2006). Data for this study are taken from a corpus of video-recorded unscripted informal English conversations, collected using adult participants in small groups. This study examines the sequential and co-occurring deployment of embodied actions and speech as participants take stances and align themselves relative to others’ stances. We argue that participants use embodied action, without accompanying talk, to indexically achieve stance-taking and social action in interactional contexts. |
|
