The Use of Co-enactment for Joint Stance-taking in Flemish Sign Language Interactions

This article investigates the use of co-enactment for stance-taking in Flemish Sign Language (VGT) interactions. Enactment, i.e., a signer or speaker combining “bodily movements, postures and eye gaze to ‘construct’ actions and dialogue in order to ‘show’ characters, events and points of view” (Hodge and Ferrara, 2014, p. 373) serves as a resource not only for depicting characters and events but also for expressing the signer's stance on these characters and events. Furthermore, through enactment, signers invite their interlocutors to adopt their perspective on the events depicted, thus influencing mutual understanding and involvement. While previous research has extensively explored formal aspects of individual enactments, co-enactments, i.e. sequences in which multiple participants jointly enact the same event, are largely unexplored in signed interactions. The present study identifies three functions of co-enactments, as evidenced in the data: grounding, joint stance-taking, and joint fantasizing. Furthermore, I examine the sequential unfolding of these enactments, as well as their design, including body partitioning, through which signers simultaneously manage the discourse and enact characters. The results demonstrate that, in contrast to traditional views that depict enactments as solitary activities, co-enactments involve both signers in jointly shaping and evaluating stance objects, thereby facilitating intersubjective conceptualizations of events and stance alignment. • Signers engage in collaboratively shaping and reshaping an enacted character or event. • Co-enactments play a role in grounding and joint stance taking. • Body partitioning and gaze shifts help signers manage discourse and enact characters. • Studying dialogic data reveals the collaborative nature of enactments in VGT.