Some Suggestions for the Study of Stance in Communication

Interlocutors, express not only information in the form of spoken words but also their feelings and commitments with regard to what is being said. In face-to-face communication participants interact in such a way that they react to one another's multimodal positioning in the conversation. Often this means that they take a "stance". The goal of this paper is to explore the notion of stance through a review and discussion of some of the relevant literature and then relate this to research on social signal processing (SSP). The main focus of the review is on the notion of stance in linguistics, as the point of departure for exploring other fields. Consideration of the relation between gestural communication and expression of emotions will give a more complete view of how a stance is taken and upheld.