Multimodal Stancetaking: Expressive Movement and Affective Stance. Political Debates in the German Bundestag and the Polish Sejm

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cornelia Müller
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426600435

Objective: Despite the abundant and diverse literature on stance and stancetaking the role of gesture and body movement as well as prosodic properties of this communicative activity remain hitherto only scarcely studied. The project responds to the challenge of including multimodality in stancetaking research and advances a new framework to multimodal stancetaking. Initially developed as a theoretical and methodological concept to account for metaphorical meaning-making in audiovisual media and in face-to-face interaction, the notion of 'expressive movement' is the pathway offered to explain and analyze how stancetaking as a multimodal activity becomes a temporally-structured affective experience.Integrating Methods: Multimodal stancetaking is investigated in political debates in the German Bundestag and the Polish Sejm. The focus is on dynamic gestural patterns along with body-postures, head movements, and speech, including its prosodic properties as multimodal expressive movements. Stancetaking is analyzed on the level of 'expressive movement units'. Units will be tagged and independently analyzed for gestural and prosodic form as well as for co-occurring speech. The debates will be transcribed, annotated, and submitted to analyses with regard to: (1) segmentation of expressive movement units, (2) analysis of expressive forms and patterns with high levels of affectivity, (3) multimodal orchestration of affective stancetaking in terms of (a) affective stance, (b) interaffective alignment. By integrating the analysis of co-speech gesture with prosodic parameters that are relatively well explored in terms of their relation to emotions or attitudes, a new angle is provided on the analysis of multimodal stancetaking. Expected Impact: The project breaks new ground by: (1) offering a new approach to multimodal stancetaking as expressive movement, (2) complementing existing research on multimodal stancetaking by including gesture-speech-prosody synchronization, and by (3) investigating multimodal stancetaking in political debates across two languages (German and Polish). The project thus provides the basis for future comparative research of multimodal stancetaking, be it across cultures, discourse genres, or different forms of political debates, and will offer open access to results and methodology.Added value of the international cooperation. To capture the dynamic complexity of multimodal forms and patterns of stancetaking as affective forms, i.e., as multimodal 'expressive movements' and their orchestration along political debates, the project integrates two unique expert teams. While the Polish team takes the lead in speech prosody analyses, the German team leads with regard to linguistic gesture analysis and application of the key concept of 'expressive movement'. By integrating the two types of expertise the project offers a unique perspective on stancetaking as multimodal expressive movement.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Poland
• Partner Organisation: Narodowe Centrum Nauki (NCN)
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Silva Ladewig
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Ewa Jarmolowicz-Nowikow; Professor Dr. Maciej Karpinski; Dr. Katarzyna Klessa