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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1453168
This article is part of the Research Topic Stance-Taking in Embodied and Virtual Interaction View all 7 articles

“That was really a productive segment, wasn’t it?” Nonverbal discourse markers of humor in the American presidential debates of 2016 and 2020

Provisionally accepted
Sabina Tabacaru Sabina Tabacaru 1,2*
  • 1 Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France
  • 2 UR TransCrit, Saint-Denis, France

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

    These past few years have marked a growing interest in multimodality, interaction and eyegaze in the interpretation and understanding of discourse. Eye-gaze, for example, plays a central role in face-to-face interaction and stance taking (Brône et al., 2017) because it helps discourse participants coordinate with each other (Feyaerts, 2013). Such visual markers help the interlocutors/audience to intersubjectively connect to the same common ground on which they construe their meanings (Clark, 1996). The case of humor has also received more attention from a multimodal perspective (Tabacaru, 2019; Priego-Valverde, 2023) since it follows the same patterns of meaning construction and coordination. Elements that are salient to the humorous interpretation will be emphasized using either prosodic cues or visual markers, such as facial expressions and head movements. In this paper, we explore the use of such nonverbal discourse markers with the use of humor in the American presidential debates of 2016 and 2020, analyzing their role on the humorous stance (see also De Vries, Oben, Brône, 2021). a mis en forme : Surlignage a mis en forme : Retrait : Première ligne : 1 cm

    Keywords: Humor, Sarcasm, stance, multimodality, nonverbal, Political debates

    Received: 22 Jun 2024; Accepted: 23 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Tabacaru. 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: Sabina Tabacaru, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, France

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