Multimodal stance-taking in interaction—A systematic literature review

Abstract

Stance-taking, the public act of positioning oneself toward objects, people or states of affairs, has been studied in many fields of research. Recently, its multimodal realization in interaction has received increasing attention. The current contribution aims to take stock of research on multimodal stance-taking so far, and to present possible avenues for future research. We systematically gathered and appraised 76 articles that investigate the involvement of bodily-visual resources in stance-taking in interaction. The critical appraisal focused on two dimensions of the stance act: form-function relations constituting it, and its dynamic organization in interaction. Regarding form-function relations, we found systematic involvement of specific bodily-visual resources in different stance acts, as well as patterns of multimodal intensification and mitigation of stances. As for its dynamic organization, the review discusses how stance-taking is organized temporally throughout an interaction, with all participants involved carefully negotiating and adapting their stances to one another. Finally, attention is paid to the broader context of stance-taking, including its role in different social and societal contexts. Based on this review, we were able to identify several gaps in the literature, and avenues for future research. We argue that much potential for broadening the scope of research lies in increasing the methodological diversity in approaching multimodal stance-taking, as well as in cross-linguistic studies and varying settings and participant constellations. In conclusion, research into multimodal stance-taking is vibrant, with ample opportunities for future work. This review can be considered as a call to action to move beyond the premise that stance-taking is multimodal, and further investigate this intriguing and fundamental human capacity.

“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

“…As I transcribed, I attended particularly to aspects of participants' embodied actions highlighted in my literature review, such as types of force used (Wehling, 2017), use of space and other "utterance qualities" (Hoenes del Pinal, 2011, p. 601), and other (non-manual) aspects of embodiment, such as facial expression and gaze (e.g., Beaupoil-Hourdel and Morgenstern, 2021;Heller, 2021). My transcription and analysis were also guided by sociocultural linguistic scholarship on stance-taking, particularly by a nonlogocentric view of stance as a multimodal phenomenon (see, e.g., Andries et al, 2023) and by Kiesling's (2018a) view of stance as involving the creation of three types of relationships: "investment (relationship to the talk itself), evaluation (relationship to entities in talk), and alignment (relationship to others in the interaction)" (p. 10). The episodes presented below were chosen for more in-depth analysis because they include clear examples of not only the target gestural forms and situated social uses of these forms, but also metapragmatic reflections on them, such as "meta-corporeal" comments (Burdelski, 2020b) constructing particular bodily forms in culturally specific ways.…”

“…In part, this indispensability reflects the fact that, as conventionalized, culturally shared resources, these emblems were often less ambiguous than spontaneous gestures (such as Brooklyn's "perimeter" gesture and Paula's "gavel" gesture) but more ambiguous than explicit verbal assessments since they had both distraction-mitigating and conflict-intensifying functions in Room Z, thereby allowing students to appear to align with the teachers' efficiency-oriented academic communication practices while also helping them disalign with one another's actions and stances. Compared with similar verbal actions, these gestures also afforded students more possibilities for synchronizing stance expressions and for avoiding explicitly stating locally inappropriate (i.e., oppositional, facethreatening) evaluations (see Andries et al, 2023). Indeed, with regard to the latter point, gestures in general-including even very conventionalized gestures like emblems-are often treated as having a greater degree of plausible deniability than speech (Gawne and Cooperrider, 2022).…”

“…Drawing on work in language socialization, gesture studies, and other areas of sociocultural linguistics, I propose a gestural socialization perspective for analyzing how participants' gesture practices, along with their use of other semiotic resources, were fundamental to the stances they took within and on peer conflicts. This analysis addresses gaps in several areas, including the need for multimodal approaches to conflict (e.g., Sifianou, 2019), more research on embodiment in children's disputes (e.g., LeMaster, 2020), greater attention to gestures that signal control and domination (e.g., Wehling, 2017), and perspectives on stance-taking that integrate various modes and stance types (e.g., Andries et al, 2023). The next section situates these contributions within relevant literature and then presents the gestural socialization perspective that guides the study.…”

Mocking enactments: a case study of multimodal stance-stacking

“…Furthermore, although the Stance Triangle is modality agnostic in theory, traditionally, the focus of stance-taking research has been on lexico-grammatical and to a lesser extent prosodic means ( Biber and Finegan, 1989 ; Couper-Kuhlen, 2012 ; Wang et al, 2022 ). Over the past years, interest in multimodal research on stance-taking has increased ( Andries et al, 2023 ). Research in this domain highlighted that the whole body can be used to take a stance, with individual semiotic resources operating flexibly depending on the interactional needs.…”

“…Although there is considerable evidence for the inherent multimodal nature of stance-taking ( Andries et al, 2023 ), there are still many open questions. One aspect that has not received systematic attention yet concerns the construction of so-called stance-stacks ( Dancygier, 2012 ) in which multiple stances are communicated simultaneously.…”