Multimodal (di)stance in interaction. Eye gaze, irony and joint pretence

Professor Geert Brone from KU Leuven, Antwerp, focuses on the role of eye gaze as a grounding mechanism in teasing and irony as subcategories of interactional humor, using humorous sequences taken from a multimodal video corpus of three-party face-to-face interactions, in which the gaze behavior of all participants was recorded using mobile eyetracking devices. From the speaker perspective, Prof. Brone discusses gaze patterns as a feedback monitoring mechanism, allowing speakers to track the reaction from the different recipients in the interaction and to invite the others to join in a specific stance-taking act. From the perspective of the recipients, he zooms in on reaction monitoring between the recipients. He presents the results of the analysis, which are based on a systematic comparison between the humorous sequences and a random selection of nonhumorous sequences taken from the same corpus and talks about a number of interesting patterns which the study’s findings reveal.