Conference article

I am definitely certain of this! : Towards a multimodal repertoire of signals communicating a high degree of certainty

Laura Vincze
Dipartimento di Filosofia, Comunicazione e Spettacolo, Università Roma Tre, Italy

Isabella Poggi
Dipartimento di Filosofia, Comunicazione e Spettacolo, Università Roma Tre, Italy

Download article

Published in: Proceedings of the 4th European and 7th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication (MMSYM 2016), Copenhagen, 29-30 September 2016

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 141:14, p. 102-110

Show more +

Published: 2017-09-21

ISBN: 978-91-7685-423-5

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

When talking to other people, speakers do not only communicate their beliefs but also their degree of commitment towards such beliefs, their “epistemic stance”, and they do so by means of both verbal and body markers.

The paper presents an analysis of the body markers that speakers use to convey high certainty and obviousness of the beliefs communicated while exposing detailed knowledge falling into their professional expertise to an audience of peer hearers. In a corpus of 42 video abstracts where doctors and medical researchers orally illustrate their scientific findings, two signals of high certainty (headshake and eye-closure) and two of obviousness (Palm Up Open Hand and shoulder shrug) are analysed from a semantic and cognitive point of view. The differences and relationships among these body markers and their verbal concomitant markers, along with their semantic nuances, are illustrated in depth.

Keywords

No keywords available

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford, Oxford University Press.ird.

Birdwhistell, Ray (1966) Some relations between American kinesics and spoken American English. In: A. Smith, ed., Communication and culture, 182-189. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Bongelli, Ramona, and Andrzej Zuczkowski (2008) Indicatori linguistici percettivi e cognitivi. Aracne, Roma Castelfranchi, Cristiano, and Isabella Poggi (1998) Bugie, finzioni e sotterfugi. Per una scienza dell’inganno. Carocci, Roma

Cienki, Alan, and Cornelia Müller (2008). Metaphor, gesture, and thought. In Raymond W.Gibbs (Ed.) The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, pp. 483-501.

Cornillie, Bert (2010). An interactional approach to epistemic and evidential adverbs. In Gabriele Diewald and Elena Smirnova (Eds.), Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages. Berlin / New York, de Gruyter, pp. 309-330.

del Olmo, Sonia Oliver (2014) Hedging and attitude markers in Spanish and English scientific medical writing. Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts 25: 273-290.

Debras, Camille, and Alan Cienki (2012). Some uses of head tilts and shoulder shrugs during human interaction, and their relation to stancetaking. Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust (PASSAT), 2012 International Conference on and 2012 International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom). IEEE, 2012.

Debras, Camille (2015). Visual stance markers: is shrugging lexical or grammatical? Oral presentation at 13th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Newcastle. Theme session: Grammar, Speaker’s gestures, and Conceptualization.

Maynard, Douglas W., and John Heritage (2005). Conversation analysis, doctor–patient interaction and medical communication. Medical education 39.4: 428-435.

DeLancey, Scott. (2001) The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of pragmatics 33.3: 369-382.

Dendale, Patrick, and Liliane Tasmowski (2001). Introduction: Evidentiality and related notions. Journal of pragmatics 33.3 (2001): 339-348

Dijkstra, Christel, Emiel Krahmer, and Marc Swerts (2006). Manipulating uncertainty. The contribution of different audiovisual prosodic cues to the perception of confidence. In R. Hoffmann and H. Mixdoff (eds.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Speech Prosody.

Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen (1969) The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica 1.1: 49-98.

de Haan, Ferdinand (2001). The relation between modality and evidentiality. In Müller, Reimar & Reis, Marga (eds.), Modalität und Modalverben im Deutschen. Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 9. Hamburg: H. Buske, 201-216.

Hyland, Ken (1998). Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. John Benjamins.

Hyland, Ken, and Polly Tse (2004) Metadiscourse in Academic Writing: A Reappraisal. Applied Linguistics 25 (2): 156-177.

Hyland, Ken (2005) Stance and engagement: A model of interaction in academic discourse. Discourse studies 7.2: 173-192.

Jehoul, Annelies, Geert Brône, and Kurt Feyaerts (Forth.). The shrug as marker of obviousness. Corpus evidence from Dutch face-to-face conversations. Linguistics Vanguard.

Johnson, Mark (1987) The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Jokinen, Kristiina, and Jens Allwood (2010). Hesitation in intercultural communication: some observations and analyses on interpreting shoulder shrugging. In Toru Ishida (Ed.) Culture and computing. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 55-70.

Kamio, Akio (1994) The theory of territory of information: The case of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 21.1, pp. 67-100.

Kärkkäinen, Elise, 2003. Epistemic Stance in English Conversations. A Description of its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I Think. Amsterdam, Benjamins

Kendon, Adam (2002). Some uses of the head shake. Gesture 2.2, pp 147-182.

Kendon, Adam (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Landmark, Anne Marie Dalby, Pål Gulbrandsen, and Jan Svennevig (2015) Whose decision? Negotiating epistemic and deontic rights in medical treatment decisions. Journal of Pragmatics 78: 54-69.

Marín Arrese, Juana (2011). Epistemic legitimizing strategies, commitment and accountability in discourse. Discourse Studies 13(6), 789-797.

Marín Arrese, Juana (2015) Epistemicity and Stance: A cross-linguistic study of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. Discourse Studies 17 (2): 210 –225

McClave, Evelyn Z. (2001). The relationship between spontaneous gestures of the hearing and American Sign Language. Gesture 1.1 (2001): 51-72.

Mondada, Lorenza (2013). Displaying, contesting and negotiating epistemic authority in social interaction: descriptions and questions in guided visits. Discourse Studies 15 (5): 597-626.

Müller, Cornelia (2004). Forms and uses of the Palm Up Open Hand: A case of a gesture family? In Cornelia Müller and Roland Posner (Eds.), The Semantics and Pragmatics of everyday Gestures. Berlin, Weidler.

Poggi, Isabella (2007) Mind, Hands, Face and Body. A goal and belief view of multimodal communication. Weidler Buchverlag

Bitti, Pio E. Ricci, Luisa Bonfiglioli, Paolo Melani, Roberto Caterina, Pierluigi Garotti (2014) Expression and communication of doubt/uncertainty through facial expression. Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica. Journal of Theories and Research in Education 9.1: 159-177.

Robinson, Jeffrey D., and John Heritage (2016). How patients understand physicians’ solicitations of additional concerns: implications for up-front agenda setting in primary care. Health communication 31 (4): 434-444.

Salager-Meyer, Françoise (1994) Hedges and textual communicative function in medical English written discourse. English for specific purposes 13.2: 149-170.

Peräkylä, Anssi (1997) Conversation analysis: a new model of research in doctor-patient communication." Journal of the Royal society of Medicine 90.4: 205-221.

Poggi, Isabella, and Francesca D’Errico (2016). Finding Mussolini’s charisma in his multimodal discourse. In Fabio Paglieri, Laura Bonelli, and Silvia Felletti (Eds.) The Psychology of Argument. Cognitive Approaches to Argumentation and Persuasion. London, College Publications.

Roseano, Paolo, González Montserrat, Joan Borràs-Comes, and Pilar Prieto (2014). Communicating Epistemic Stance: How Speech and Gesture Patterns Reflect Epistemicity and Evidentiality. Discourse Processes. DOI:10.1080/0163853X.2014.969137.

Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.

Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, and Karin Aijmer. The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Vol. 56. Walter de Gruyter, 2007.

Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig. "Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction." The morality of knowledge in conversation(2011): 3-24.

Streeck, Jürgen (2009). Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Vincze, Laura, and Isabella Poggi (2011). Communicative functions of eye closing behaviours. In Anna Esposito, Alessandro Vinciarelli, Klára Vicsi, Catherine Pelachaud, and Anton Nijholt (Eds.) Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment. The Processing Issues. Berlin-Heidelberg, Springer. 393-405.

White, Peter (2003) Beyond modality and hedging: A dialogic view of the language of intersubjective stance. Text 23(2, pp. 259–284

Zuczkowski, Andrzej, Ramona Bongelli, and Ilaria Riccioni I (2017). Epistemic Stance in Dialogue: Knowing, Unknowing, Believing. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Citations in Crossref