Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation During Storytelling: When Nodding Is a Token of Affiliation

Abstract

Through stories, tellers communicate their stance toward what they are reporting. Story recipients rely on different interactional resources to display alignment with the telling activity and affiliation with the teller's stance. In this article, I examine the communication resources participants to tellings rely on to manage displays of alignment and affiliation during the telling. The primary finding is that whereas vocal continuers simply align with the activity in progress, nods also claim access to the teller's stance toward the events (whether directly or indirectly). In mid-telling, when a recipient nods, she or he claims to have access to the teller's stance toward the event being reported, which in turn conveys preliminary affiliation with the teller's position and that the story is on track toward preferred uptake at story completion. Thus, the concepts of structural alignment and social affiliation are separate interactional issues and are managed by different response tokens in the mid-telling sequential environment.

Notes

1 Although mid-telling responses likely vary by culture, it may be that all cultures will have resources for managing the issues discussed here. Levinson & Brown (2004)showed that the feedback systems of Yélî-Dnye and Tzeltal are quite different in that the former is more oriented to visible response tokens and the latter to vocal ones.

2 Some research within gesture studies has focused specifically on nodding (Kendon, 2004; Maynard, 1987; McClave, 2000). However, this work neglects the sequential context of the nods.

3 Oblique sequences may be affiliative or disaffiliative. Here, the boy initiates repair on his mother's use of “buddy,” apparently challenging this as an appropriate characterization of the teammate. Thus, this sort of sequence initiation is both disaffiliative with the mother and disaligning with the activity in progress.

4 Ward, Birner, and Huddleston (2002) used this phrase to refer to clause constructions that differ from “the most basic, or canonical, constructions in the language” (p. 1365). Ward et al. (2002) asserted that these constructions have a “syntactically more basic counterpart differing not in truth conditions or illocutionary meaning but in the way the information content is presented” (p. 1365). Here, I broaden this concept to include not only pragmatically marked constructions in this context (e.g., passives and clefts) but also marked lexical choices and marked aspect.

5 The “get-passive” has been discussed as indicating some involvement on the part of the participant (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1983) or indicating that he or she shares some responsibility (Budwig, 1990) and in this way differs from the “be-passive.” Arce-Arenales, Axelrod, and Fox (1994) handled this difference in an alternative way. Arce-Arenales et al. (1994) argued that constructions such as this are actually still in active voice but exhibit “middle diathesis” because the participant “also exhibits the conceptual status ‘affected entity’” (p. 2). I have used passive here because there appears to be disagreement in the literature on this topic, and passive captures the core interest in reduced agency relevant here.

6 Lance's own stance could have been quite different. Lance could have adopted a stance that this was a serious problem that they would need to remedy. In that case, an affiliative response would have been treating the event as bad, “Oh that's horrible!,” or treating an apology as due, “Didju tell her we were really sorry.”

7 Of course, nods cannot be used effectively when the interlocutors do not share gaze, but the point remains because the responses that contrast with a head nod are not only vocal continuers that claim alignment but also assessments. Vocal responses that would assert a stance would also be possible in this context if Nicole were not gazing.

8 Rossano (2005) documented that gaze is an interactional resource for pursuing uptake at sequence possible completion. This case is consistent with his work on the topic.

9 As Comrie (1976) observed, in English, though not in many languages, tense and aspect are separable. One may therefore find that the use of the present tense is also doing independent work in terms of facilitating access to the reportable.

10 Nonprimary story recipients sometimes nod during tellings, and this appears to have the same basic function as described here. The same pattern does not appear to occur with vocal continuers. Whereas only primary story recipients can relevantly pass on the opportunity to provide a full turn at talk, other participants can claim access to a teller's stance and can endorse that stance.

11 Both the first nod in line 5 and in 7 provide counterevidence for an alternative understanding of nods—that they apply pressure for the story to progress. Counterevidence is that (a) nods are not necessarily placed after tellers have in any way failed to progress in the telling, and (b) after nods, story tellers do not consistently move to the next story element. Thus, neither story recipients nor story tellers consistently analyze nods as pushing for progressivity first and foremost.

12 A patient telling a story to her physician about why she is concerned that a lump might be cancer does not treat the nods as confirmation that it is cancer but treats them as accepting the patient's position and how she came to be concerned.