Interactional functions of raised eyebrows by ironists and their addressees

Irony is not an exclusively verbal phenomenon: it may also be accompanied by bodily-visual cues such as facial expressions, head movements and gaze behaviour (e.g. de Vries et al., 2021). A well-known bodily-visual action related to irony is the use of raised eyebrows, with previous studies primarily focusing on ironists raising their eyebrows to signal an ironic intent, i.e. Tabacaru and Lemmens’ (2014) gestural trigger concept. This article builds on this concept by (1) verifying Tabacaru and Lemmens’ (2014) conclusions based on a dataset of spontaneous ironic utterances (n = 128), and (2) adopting a broader perspective on irony by also taking into account the ironist’s addressees’ multimodal behaviour and the timing of the interlocutors’ eyebrow movements. The article includes both an exploratory quantitative and a qualitative analysis. Results show that 38.3% of irony cases involve an eyebrow raise, coming from either the ironists (56.9%) or their addressees (43.1%). Eyebrow raises by ironists not only function as a cue for irony, but may also indicate surprise or a comprehension check, whereas addressees may raise their eyebrows to indicate surprise, understanding or agreement. Furthermore, raised eyebrows can also operate as a bodily-visual resource to (express an interactional willingness to) join an ironic interactional layer or be a part of a multimodal package that establishes an ironic layer on its own, without a verbal manifestation of irony. In conclusion, this article thus expands Tabacaru and Lemmens’ (2014) gestural trigger concept, illustrating the importance of adopting a sequential-interactional perspective on the multimodal dimension of irony.