Embodied Responses to Questions-in-Progress: Silent Nods as Affirmative Answers

ABSTRACT

This study examines head nods produced as embodied and silent answers to polar questions before a transition relevance place has been reached. It discusses the notion of “response” and the ways in which the literature conceptualizes head nods. The analysis of video recordings of ordinary and institutional multiparty interactions shows that answer-nods rely on mutual gaze and that affirmative head nods may co-occur with other facial expressions (e.g., eye blinks). By replying with a silent head nod, respondents may complete an unfolding adjacency pair without claiming speakership, thereby enabling the questioner to extend their turn-in-progress. Alternatively, respondents may expand their answer-nod with talk, in which case silent nodding may contribute to organizing the smooth transition of turns-at-talk. Head nods produced while a question is unfolding are described as a microsequential phenomenon that may affect the questioner’s turn-in-progress. Data are in French and Italian.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Arnulf Deppermann, Simona Pekarek Doehler, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article. I also thank Charlotte Bourgoin, Virginia Calabria, Federica D’Antoni, Thomas Debois, and Ignacio Satti for their stimulating thoughts on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For an overview of EMCA studies on polar questions see Heritage and Raymond (2012).

2. On occasion, backchannels can also be “sought for” by speakers, who may use specific resources (e.g., tag questions) to elicit some form of (embodied) feedback from their recipients.

3. In several articles, the notion of response covers the different types described above (e.g., Barth-Weingarten, 2011; Vatanen, 2018).

4. “[…] significa frequente inclinatione di capo, per esprimer atto affermativo” (Bonifacio, 1616, I, VI, p. 21).

5. See already Fries (1952, p. 49) and, from a conversation-analytic perspective, Schegloff (1987): “[t]he vertical shake or nod has a major use as a ‘continuer’ or indicator that a recipient of speech understands that an extended unit of talk is in progress […]” (p. 106).

6. Moreover, some authors (e.g., McClave, 2000) have attempted a comprehensive description of nodding, whereas others have focused on supposedly language-/culture-specific uses of nods; these include Maynard (1987) and Kita and Ide (2007) for Japanese.

7. In Martin Handford’s illustrations, the main character (named Charlie in the French edition) wears a red and white striped jumper.

8. Of course, participants may treat silent eye blinks also as embodied continuers (see Hömke, 2018). However, in this fragment Vahina can be seen to treat Romain’s blinking as an affirmative response to her question (as described by De Jorio, 1832, p. 39), as shown by her handing him the tablet she is holding in her hands precisely after the blinking has occurred.

9. In order to preserve the participants’ privacy, no illustrations are used to support the analysis of this excerpt.

10. According to Rule 1, “[t]he gaze of a speaker should locate the party being gazed at as an addressee of his utterance” (C. Goodwin, 1979, p. 99).

11. Deppermann (2018) describes a similar use for German dann (“then”) which is “indexing an inference which the speaker draws from an interlocutor’s prior turn, but which the speaker does not expect to have been meant or to be confirmed by the prior speaker” (p. 39). Of course, in this excerpt the (not overtly stated) inference is that Antoine has a nonmodestly sized sex.

12. In Italian, it is prosody, not syntax, that allows one to distinguish polar questions from declarative assertions (Rossano, 2010). Moreover, subject pronouns not being mandatory (as in “può essere anche”/literally “can be also”; l. 01), the dichotomic distinction between declarative versus interrogative format becomes impractical. In this article I translated the target turns with an English interrogative format, since recipients treat them as questions (see also the French ex. 3).

13. The authors categorized the eye blinks on the basis of their length as “short” (<410 ms) or “long” (≥410 ms) and observed “that (a) addressee blinks cluster at both final and nonfinal TCU ends; (b) that long blinks have a distinctive distribution regarding the concurrent production of nods and continuers; and that (c) long blinks are more likely than short blinks to be produced during mutual gaze—together suggesting that long blinks have a signaling capacity, producing feedback at critical points in the telling” (Hömke et al., 2017, p. 61). However, their study focuses on recipient displays of feedback, not on embodiment of affirmative responses.

14. Already De Jorio (1832, pp. 39–41) explains that head nods acquire different meanings based on the way in which they are performed.

15. These are not the figures Annina mentions in the original recording. They have been altered to conceal sensitive information related to the company’s financial situation.

16. Note that the transcription shows what might be a second nod, indicated as (ˇ ˆ). However, its status is questionable, since Rino simultaneously starts to move his upper body closer to the table and the head movement might just be related to that specific skeletomuscular activity.

17. See also the notions of other-initiated increment (Schegloff, 2016, pp. 258–261) and recipient increment (Bolden, 2010). For an overview on self- and other-increments in Italian, see Calabria and De Stefani (2020).

18. On occasion, nodding can also slightly precede the establishment of mutual gaze (see Ex. 5).

19. Stivers (2019) lists nods as “unmarked interjection answers” (p. 197). However, in the data she presents, silent answer-nods are not discussed. In Ex. 8 (p. 200) a head nod occurs in concomitance with the token “Ri:ght.” (an “upgraded interjection answer” in the author’s terminology), whereas in Ex. 10 (p. 202) it accompanies the token “Probably,” (a “downgraded interjection answer”). It appears that such “response packages” (Kärkkäinen & Thompson, 2018) are analyzed and categorized on the basis of their vocal component only.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by KU Leuven under grant C14/18/034. It is a contribution to the project “Beyond the clause: Encoding and inference in clause combining”, codirected by Bert Cornillie, Kristin Davidse, Elwys De Stefani, and Jean-Christophe Verstraete (2018–2022). The data used for this study were collected within two projects: (1) ALIAS (Archivio di LInguA Spontanea), funded by KU Leuven as an educational project (project number OWP2012/08) and directed by Stefania Marzo, Elwys De Stefani, and Bart Van Den Bossche (2012–2014); and (2) CIEL-F (Corpus International Écologique de la Langue Française), funded by the Association Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and directed by Lorenza Mondada (University of Lyon 2-ENS) and Stefan Pfänder (University of Freiburg) [http://www.ciel-f.org].