Stance-Taking in Embodied and Virtual Interaction

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Background

A fundamental property of human language is its ability to simultaneously represent subjects, objects or events, and express the speaker’s stance towards these representations. The notion of stance-taking involves a positioning along three different axes: epistemic (the distribution of knowledge, e.g., by expressing certainty or uncertainty), affective (the expression of attitudes and feelings), and deontic (the expression of desirability or necessity of an action). (Psycho)linguistics and neighboring fields have a long track record in the study of stance-taking as a socially contextualized and recognized interpersonal phenomenon, focusing on the lexical and grammatical resources that language users have at their disposal to communicate stance, but also on the cognitive processes underlying this positioning. In addition, the phenomenon has been studied extensively in different communicative settings (from spontaneous face-to-face communication to institutional and mediated forms of interaction), from different disciplinary angles (Interactional Linguistics, Ethnomethodology, Cognitive Psychology, HCI Research, etc.) and using different empirical methods (from controlled experiments to qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis).

Recent studies have explored the ways in which embodied resources such as hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and eye gaze play a role in the expression of stance (see Andries et al. 2023 for a systematic literature review). What is largely missing to date, however, is systematic empirical research that shows the interplay of these resources in the realization of multimodal stance acts, as well as the cognitive processes that drive the choice of these resources. The goal of this Research Topic is to collect original research that helps to bridge this gap, by zooming in on either the co-occurrence of (i.e., ‘multimodal packages’) or interdependence between different semiotic resources (i.e., sequential relationship within or across speakers). Although the focus is on language in interaction, the Topic explicitly aims to unite a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from the study of naturally occurring interactions to carefully controlled experiments that tap into the cognitive underpinnings of multimodal stance-taking.

Apart from the basic question on how stance is multimodally construed and negotiated in spoken and signed face-to-face interaction, the Research Topic also wants to explore the strategies that interlocutors employ to express stance in mediated forms of interaction. More specifically, given the recent surge in the use of video conferencing and virtual communication tools and the (public) availability of corpora of interactions using such tools, we can empirically study the affordances and constraints of different communicative settings.

With this Research Topic on stance-taking in embodied and virtual interaction, we aim to collect original research on this emerging theme, with a particular focus on empirical studies that present a decidedly multimodal approach to this phenomenon. We invite contributors to present work that deals with the following questions:

• Which recurrent multimodal patterns can be identified for the expression of stance in spoken and signed interaction?
• How are multimodal stance acts negotiated interactionally and embedded sequentially?
• What are the cognitive processes underpinning the expression and negotiation of stance in interaction?
• What are the similarities and differences in the multimodal realization of stance across languages?
• What is the impact of medium on the strategies that interlocutors employ to express stance?
• What is the interplay between the local dimensions of stance-taking (including its sequential embeddedness) and its more global effects in terms of interpersonal relationships, emotion work and identity construction?
• Which quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches can provide valuable insights into multimodal stance-taking phenomena?
• How can researchers tap into the underlying dynamic mental processes involved in the construal and negotiation of stance?

Keywords: Stance-taking, Human interaction, Multimodality, Interpersonal coordination, Language and emotion, (Dis)agreement

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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