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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1436191
This article is part of the Research Topic Stance-Taking in Embodied and Virtual Interaction View all 4 articles

What's in a look? The accountability of gaze in trajectories to conflict

Provisionally accepted
Rebecca Clift Rebecca Clift *
  • University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper investigates the role of gaze in initiating episodes of conflict by examining, using multimodal conversation analysis, a set of cases in which a recipient is prompted to speak by another's extended gaze. In these cases, this recipient response may be, e.g. 'What', or a more elaborate demand for an account, such as 'Why are you looking at me like that for'. Here we investigate the characteristics of the gaze that prompts such responses -and what actions such responses constitute. While 'What' compositionally resembles other-initiated repair, its sequential position characterizes it as so-called 'goahead' action. In these cases, the sequential positioning of such gazes, constituting it structurally as a so-called 'pre', alongside its durational characteristics and facial expression, are examined to identify the normative associations of gaze and subsequent conduct that make such gazes accountable.

    Keywords: gaze, conflict, Staring, accountability, Other-initiated repair, presequences, conversation analysis

    Received: 21 May 2024; Accepted: 02 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Clift. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Rebecca Clift, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom

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