Gaze as a resource in initiating and completing sequences of interaction in Woody Allen's cinematic discourse

Abstract

Gaze, as a crucial interactional resource in face-to-face talk-in-interactions, has a number of functions. One of them is the regulatory function, which is associated with the process of initiating and completing sequences of talk-in-interaction. Although this function has been widely analysed in naturally-occurring interactions, there is a noticeable absence of such research into diegetic interactions, i.e. interactions between represented participants in films. Therefore, this paper investigates the use of gaze by represented participants in initiating and completing sequences in dyadic diegetic interactions. The data come from a few film scenes from several films by Woody Allen. The principal question is whether and how gaze is used to initiate and complete sequences of talk-in-interaction. The analytic tool is multimodal conversation analysis, which integrates the analysis of speech with other embodied interactional resources, such as gaze and body language. Findings show that gaze plays a crucial role in initiating new and completing ongoing sequences. Whereas in the former cases speakers usually direct gaze at their interlocutors, in the latter ones they almost invariably avert gaze from recipients, thus marking their intention to complete the sequence. Nevertheless, it is important to conduct further, more extensive research into film data to gain more insight into this use of gaze.