Abstract
The present study explores affective stance in conversational storytelling by investigating the ways in which unknowing story recipients display affective stances toward a teller’s story through questions that deploy multimodal resources. The data are based on videotaped natural face-to-face conversations between native Japanese speakers. While unknowing story recipients ask questions of the storyteller only to elicit factual information (“neutral questions”), they also ask questions layered with affect (“affect-loaded questions”). Building on studies on affect and stance, assessment, questions, and alignment and affiliation in storytelling, I demonstrate how unknowing story recipients ask affect-loaded questions to elicit and display affective stances toward story contents by exploiting linguistic and non-linguistic resources. First, I explicate how unknowing story recipients employ not only linguistic devices (e.g., emotion words, wh-questions, and deictic expressions such as sonna “like that”), but also prosody, facial expressions, body movements, and pre-/concurrent-laughter in order to load questions with affective stance that display, for example, disgust, humor, sarcasm, criticism, or surprise. Secondly, I show how unknowing story recipients use rhetorical questions to express their affect (rather than to elicit information from the storyteller). Thirdly, I demonstrate how affiliation of affective stance between storyteller and unknowing story recipients influences the trajectory of storytelling and how the participants negotiate their affective stances. This study sheds light on the interactional process of how participants in talk-in-interaction display affective stance through a range of multimodal resources, by examining how unknowing story recipients ask affect-loaded questions of the storyteller. It illuminates the social practice of story recipients’ active participation in storytelling activity that is embedded in social interaction, through their use of questions that dynamically co-construct and negotiate affective stance.
Highlights
This study investigates affect in Japanese storytelling, focusing on how “unknowing” story recipients, who are “possible recipient[s] not expected to know about an event being reported by a speaker” (Goodwin, 1979: p. 100), elicit affective stance from a storyteller or display their own affective stance toward the story or the storyteller through questions deploying multimodal resources
I explicated that the unknowing story recipients employed lexical and syntactic devices including adjectives of emotions, wh-questions, deictic words such as sonna “like that”, and non-predicate-final utterances, and prosody, facial expressions, body movements, and pre-/concurrent laughter in order to elicit factual information and the emotional states of the storyteller during the event recounted in the story and to display their own affective stance, which arose during the storytelling activity
I demonstrated how affiliation and disaffiliation of affective stance between storyteller and unknowing story recipients significantly influence the trajectory of storytelling sequence
Summary
This study investigates affect in Japanese storytelling, focusing on how “unknowing” story recipients, who are “possible recipient[s] not expected to know about an event being reported by a speaker” (Goodwin, 1979: p. 100), elicit affective stance from a storyteller or display their own affective stance toward the story or the storyteller through questions deploying multimodal resources. How unknowing story recipients contribute to storytelling in bringing out the storyteller’s affective stance during storytelling has not been fully examined far. I will explore displays of affective stance in storytelling, the functions and multimodal aspects of “affect-loaded questions”, which I define as questions layered with affect, and the participation frameworks of storytelling in conversations, using videotaped natural face-to-face conversations between native speakers of Japanese. I will analyze how the unknowing story recipients use rhetorical questions not to elicit information, but rather to express their own affect. In the present study (Section 3.5), I will consider rhetorical questions more in detail, examining their function of displaying a questioner’s affective stance and analyzing how their format and their accompanying non-linguistic aspects contribute to their being construed as rhetorical questions that do not seek a response. While most of the previous studies on questions examined the forms, meanings, functions, and social actions of questions with regard to syntactic structures or the epistemic status of participants, this study intends to reveal how unknowing story recipients layer their questions with their affect by examining talk, prosody, and body movements
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