(Amphithéâtre)
Stivers, Tanya (coordinator)
(Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
The use of the body in displaying alignment
and disalignment
People make use of a wide variety of vocal and kinesic resources to
display alignment and disalignment in social interaction. Most of the
current research on alignment behaviors has focused on the vocal
modality. For instance, upgraded assessments (Pomerantz, 1984),
Oh-prefaced responses with assessments (Heritage, 2002), and the
interjection of assessments between TCUs in extended turns of talk
(Goodwin, C., 1986) are all examples of verbal resources for dealing
with alignment between speakers. Müller (1996) has shown that
prosody can differentiate the same verbal continuer as affi liative or
disaffi liative. Relatively little work has examined the role of the body
in affi liating or disaffi liating with a speaker. This panel will address
this issue focusing on extended tellings in a variety of contexts.
Asmuss paper will examine story tellings and the ways in which the
kinesic and vocal modalities are brought together to do affi liation.
Ruusuvuori and Peräkylä will examine the provision and reception
of evaluations in an everyday context and show how facial displays
are used both to secure and display affi liation. Finally, Stivers will
examine the differential use of vocal and kinesic response tokens as
displays of recipiency in tellings. Together these papers extend our
understanding of the role of the body in the organisation of social
interaction and the resources relied on to display alignment and
disalignment in social interaction.
