Enactment en complexe vormen van stance-taking in Vlaamse Gebarentaal: een multimodaal perspectief

When Flemish Sign Language (VGT) signers share experiences and tell stories, they frequently engage in enactment, using their entire body to not just tell what happened or would happen, but to show the actions, thoughts, utterances or feelings of a referent (Cormier et al., 2015; Hodge & Ferrara, 2014). Enactment may serve as a resource for denoting referents and their actions as well as their feelings, attitudes and thoughts. Moreover, signers use it to expresses their personal stance (Du Bois, 2007). This stance-taking can be achieved through the design of the enactment—e.g., exaggerated or stereotypical enactments of referents or social groups (Fischer & Kollien, 2016; Palfreyman, 2020), and/or through sequential or simultaneous narration providing comments about the enacted referent or event from the viewpoint of the signer themselves (Janzen, 2019). These composite utterances allow signers to express multiple stances from multiple viewpoints: from that of the enacted referent, the signer, or both. The potential of enactment for complex stance-taking raises compelling questions about how signers formally design enactments and sequentially embed them, individually, but also collaboratively in interaction. While the multimodal nature of stance-taking has received increasing attention over the past twenty years (Andries et al., 2023), research on the multimodal construction and temporal unfolding of complex stance acts or stance-stacks (Dancygier, 2012), e.g. involving enactment, is lacking, particularly for signed languages. The current dissertation draws on a dataset taken from the Corpus VGT (Van Herreweghe et al., 2015), comprising one hour of free dyadic conversations and four hours of guided dyadic conversations on the topic 'what do you remember about?', where signers recollect past experiences. Taking a multimodal qualitative and sequential approach, I investigate how enactments are used for the purpose of (complex) stance-taking in dyadic interactions in Flemish Sign Language. The current dissertation bundles six independent publications that aim to gain insight into how enactments are used for the purpose of stance-taking in dyadic interactions in Flemish Sign Language. The analysis of the dataset of five hours of dyadic conversations showed that enactment is a widely used resource for complex stance-taking by deaf Flemish signers. I show how VGT signers may express a stance through both the viewpoint of the narrator and the enacted character by means of shared or ambiguous ownership of articulator activity, resulting in polyphonic stance expressions. A case study of mocking enactments highlights how VGT signers express complex stance acts consisting of a serious and a non-serious layer, and negotiate alignment on these complex stance acts, allowing them to partially align with layered stances. Third, the study of co-enactments in VGT presents pioneering work on the use of enactment across turns of multiple participants in signed interactions, showing that signers can formally adopt and adapt each other's enactments and co-construct enacted scenes in an iterative process of expressing stance and eliciting alignment. Finally, the dissertation presents an analytical approach that facilitates mapping out the relationships between multiple related stance acts and the relation to viewpoint foregrounding. In sum, this dissertation sheds light on the various uses of enactment in complex stance acts in VGT, touching onto two key components of complex stance acts: 1) the temporal relation of multiple stance acts, and 2) the combination of multiple viewpoints to express complex stances. A systematic multimodal analysis of enactments in dialogic interactions has provided novel insights into their potential for co-construction and the semiotic composition when combined with narration in VGT. References Andries, F., Meissl, K., de Vries, C., Feyaerts, K., Oben, B., Sambre, P., Vermeerbergen, M., & Brône, G. (2023). Multimodal stance-taking in interaction—A systematic literature review. Frontiers in Communication, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1187977 Cormier, K., Smith, S., & Sevcikova-Sehyr, Z. (2015). Rethinking constructed action. Sign Language & Linguistics, 18(2), 167-204. https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.18.2.01cor Dancygier, B. (2012). Negation, stance verbs, and intersubjectivity. In B. Dancygier & E. Sweetser (Eds.), Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective (pp. 69-93). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084727 Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The Stance Triangle. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139-182). John Benjamins. Fischer, R., & Kollien, S. (2016). Pejorative aspects attributed to hearing people in signed constructed dialogue. In R. Finkbeiner, J. Meibauer, & H. Wiese (Eds.), Pejoration (pp. 1-30). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.228.12fis Hodge, G., & Ferrara, L. (2014). Showing the story: Enactment as performance in Auslan narratives. In L. Gawne & J. Vaughan (Eds.), Selected Papers From the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (2014) (pp. 372-397). http://hdl.handle.net/11343/40973 Janzen, T. (2019). Shared spaces, shared mind: Connecting past and present viewpoints in American Sign Language narratives. Cognitive Linguistics, 30(2), 253-279. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2018-0045 Palfreyman, N. (2020). Social meanings of linguistic variation in BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language). Asia-Pacific Language Variation, 6(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.00008.pal Van Herreweghe, M., Vermeerbergen, M., Demey, E., De Durpel, H., Nyffels, H., & Verstraete, S. (2015). Het Corpus VGT. Een digitaal open access corpus van videos and annotaties van Vlaamse Gebarentaal, ontwikkeld aan de Universiteit Gent ism KU Leuven. . http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-6973686