(Amphithéâtre)

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  Asmuss, Birte (Aarhus School of Business, Denmark)

Affiliation and disaffiliation in story-telling : on the interconnectedness of talk, facial expressions and gaze

One of the crucial places in story-telling activities is where the punchline is presented and where in the following sequence the story evaluation takes place. Here, the participants regularly mark alignment or disalignment. A study of the verbal interaction gives interesting insights into the regularities of these sequences : The participants seem to orient to a two-step procedure. First the story’s modality is addressed and then the understanding of the story is negotiated in greater detail (Asmuss, & Kjaerbeck, in press). This paper will examine everyday and institutional multiparty conversations and show that looking at the verbal aspects alone, does not give full insight into the resources story-participants make use of when negotiating alignment and disalignment in these sequences. Gaze and facial expressions seem to interconnect tightly with the verbal interaction (Laursen, 2002). In this study I will examine in detail how nonverbal resources such as facial expressions and gaze go together with the nonverbal interaction taking place in these sequences thereby contributing to the participants’ sense-making process. As I will show, facial expressions and gaze can perform interactional activities themselves, they can foreshadow upcoming verbal activities, and they can differentiate ongoing verbal activities.