"The Bitter Laughter". When Parody Is a Moral and Affective Priming in Political Persuasion

Mocking enactments: a case study of multimodal stance-stacking

Although research into multimodal stance-taking has gained momentum over the past years, the multimodal construction of so-called stacked stances has not yet received systematic attention in the literature. Mocking enactments are a prime example of such complex social actions as they are layered both interactionally and stance-related, and they rely significantly on the use of bodily visual resources, depicting rather than describing events and stances. Using Du Bois' Stance Triangle as a framework, this study investigates mocking enactments as a case study to unravel the multimodal aspects of layered stance expressions. Drawing on three data sets-music instruction in Dutch, German, and English, spontaneous face-to-face interactions among friends in Dutch, and narrations on past events in Flemish Sign Language (VGT)-this study provides a qualitative exploration of mocking enactments across different communicative settings, languages, and modalities. The study achieves three main objectives: (1) illuminating how enactments are used for mocking, (2) identifying the layers of stance-taking at play, and (3) examining the multimodal construction of mocking enactments. Our analysis reveals various different uses of enactments for mocking. Aside from enacting the target of the mockery, participants can include other characters and viewpoints, highlighting the breadth of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Second, we uncover the layered construction of stance on all axes of the Stance Triangle (evaluation, positioning, and alignment). Third, we find that mocking enactments are embedded in highly evaluative contexts, indexed by the use of bodily visual resources. Interestingly, not all mocking enactments include a multimodally exaggerated depiction, but instead, some merely allude to an absurd hypothetical scenario. Our findings contribute to the growing body of literature on multimodal stance-taking, by showing how a nuanced interpretation of the Stance Triangle can offer a useful framework for analyzing layered stance acts.

Understanding Laughter in Dialog

This work explores laughter within a corpus of three-party, task-based dialogs with native and non-native speakers of English, each consisting of two players and a facilitator, in relation to whether the laughter is perceived as serving discourse functions or rather as genuinely mirthful according to a small number of annotators’ (2) inspection of a substantical multimodal dialog corpus (18 interactions of approximately 10 min each). We test the hypothesis that those different types of laughter have occurrence patterns that relate in different ways to the topical structure of the conversations, with discourse laughter showing a stronger tendency to occur at topic termination points. All laughter events (569) are assigned to one of three values, discourse, mirthful or ambiguous, and are studied with respect to their distribution across the dialog topic sections. The analysis explores interactions among laughter type and section type, also with respect to other variables such as the facilitators’ feedback and the speakers’ conversational role and gender. Discourse laughter is more frequent at topic termination points than at topic beginnings, also in comparison to mirthful laughter. Discourse laughter is also highly associated with facilitators’ feedback type, especially at topic ends. Finally, there are few distinctive effects of gender, and an interaction among speaker role and laughter type. The results strengthen the hypothesis of the discourse function of laughter, indicating a systematicity in discourse laughter, in that it is more predictable and highly associated with the dialog topic termination points, and, on the contrary, a less systematic distribution of mirthful laughter, which shows no particular pattern in relation to topic boundaries.