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The paper merges research in multimodality with studies in epistemics and discourse analysis, and analyses the ways in which expert speakers multimodally display their knowledge and their degree of commitment toward it. In a corpus of video abstracts where medical researchers orally illustrate their findings published in the British Medical Journal, body signals of high commitment – palm-up-open-hand, headshake, eyelid-closure, and shoulder shrug – are analyzed from a semantic and cognitive point of view as markers of high certainty and obviousness. The differences and relationships among body epistemic markers and their concomitant lexical affiliates, along with their semantic nuances, are illustrated in depth.

Recent cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that speakers use a prosodic mitigation strategy when addressing higher status interlocutors by talking more slowly, reducing the intensity and lowering the overall fundamental frequency (F0). Much less is known, however, about how politeness-related meaning is expressed multimodally (i.e., combining verbal and multimodal channels). The present study investigates how Catalan native speakers encode politeness-related meanings through facial and body cues. We test whether speakers apply a gestural mitigation strategy and use specific hedging devices in socially distant situations (e.g., when asking an older person of higher status for a favor). Twenty Catalan speakers were video-recorded while participating in a discourse elicitation task where they were required to produce requests in polite and non-polite contexts. In the resulting recordings, a set of 21 facial and body cues associated with speech were coded and analyzed. The results show that politeness-related meanings are expressed through gestural mitigation strategies that go hand-in-hand with previously reported prosodic mitigation strategies. This work was financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Agencia Estatal de Investigacion, and Fondo Europeo ´ de Desarrollo Regional, grant numbers PGC2018-097007-B-100 and PID2021- 123823NB-I00; and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya, grant number 2017 SGR_971 to the Prosodic Studies Group.

Through the analysis of presuppositions, question design, social action and preference organisation in short fragments of Italian question-answer sequences, this paper aims to show that (1) wh-questions, on the one hand, and alternative and polar questions (i.e., polar interrogatives, tag and declarative questions), on the other, come from two different epistemic positions: unknowing and uncertain, respectively; (2) alternative and polar questions convey different degrees of uncertainty, thus placing themselves in different points along the epistemic continuum of the uncertain position. Keywords: Questions, Epistemic stance, Uncertainty, Unknowledge, Information-seeking, Confirmation-seeking

Literature on epistemic stance has thoroughly investigated certainty and uncertainty markers, but their effects on the reader are still unclear. This paper investigates the reader’s perception of the communication of uncertainty in biomedical texts and its effects on the reader’s emotions and decision making. Four versions of a scientific paper on the risks of egg consumption, with varying degrees of certainty, were submitted to participants in two pilots and two studies. The pilots reveal that although participants are sensitive to changes in degree of certainty, they are not so aware of the epistemic markers of uncertainty in the articles. Study 1 shows that with a different framing of the risks of egg consumption – increase of cholesterol vs. risk of heart attack –, (un)certainty has an effect both on participant’s emotions and subsequent intentions; study 2 highlights a difference between bare “lexical” certainty (simple presence of epistemic markers) and “textual” certainty (induced by contradictory sentences).

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in...

The article presents an analysis of the ways in which knowledge is displayed, contested and renegotiated in the 2007 French presidential debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. Knowledge displays can be achieved through a series of ‘neutral’ resources, such as informing, explanation or comment, or through face-damaging resources, such as questioning an unknowledgeable interlocutor to prove his inferior epistemic status (K−) and boost one’s own. The article focuses on this latter type of knowledge display where a knowledgeable participant (K+) engages in question–answer sequences with an unknowledgeable respondent (K−) in front of a third party (the audience). The article also undertakes an analysis of the multimodal strategies employed by the (K+) participant to discredit the (K−) opponent (ironic smiles and laughter). The article intends to contribute to the existent literature on epistemic stance by offering a prototypical example of incongruence between the epistemic status (K+) of the questioner and the epistemic stance he adopts (unknowing K).

The paper analyzes the move of discrediting the opponent as a means to persuasion in political debates. After analysis of a corpus of political debates, a typology of discrediting strategies is outlined, distinguished in terms of three criteria: the target—the feature of the opponent specifically attacked (dominance, competence, benevolence); the route through which it is attacked—topic, mode or directly the person; and the type of communicative act that conveys the attack (insult, criticism, correction…). The relevance of body signals in discrediting moves is highlighted.

This book explores the use of technology to detect, predict and understand social cues, in order to analyze and prevent conflict. Traditional human sciences approaches are enriched with the latest developments in Social Signal Processing aimed at an automatic understanding of conflict and negotiation. Communicationboth verbal and non-verbal, within the context of a conflictis studiedwith the aim of promotingthe use of intelligent machines that automatically measure and understand the escalation of conflict, and are able to manage it, in order to support the negotiation process. Particular attention is paid to the integration of human sciences findingswith computational approaches, from the application of correct methodologies for the collection of valid data to the development of computational approaches inspired by research on verbal and multimodal communication. In the words of the trade unionist Pierre Carniti, "We should reevaluate conflict, since without conflict there is no social justice."With this in mind, this volume does not approach conflict simply as an obstacle to be overcome, but as a concept to be fully analyzed. The philosophical, linguistic and psychological aspects of conflict, once understood, can be used to promote conflict management as a means for change and social justice.

The chapter outlines a model of insult in terms of a socio-cognitive view of multimodal communication. After setting it apart from other types of aggressive communication, like curse, imprecation and bad words, it explores its social and emotional causes and effects in everyday life and political communication, and finally proposes a semantic and pragmatic analysis of direct and indirect, verbal and bodily insults in Italian political talk shows and social media.

The paper defines the notion of agreement from a cognitive point of view and analyses types of agreement signals in TV debates. Agreement is defined as a relation of identity, similarity or congruence between the opinions of two or more persons, by contrasting it with confirmation and admission, and the connected notions of proposal, assessment and opinion are overviewed. Research is then presented on the multimodal signals of agreement in debates from the Canal 9 and the AMI corpora; different ways to express agreement are singled out in extensive discourse, single words and body signals, and analysed through an annotation scheme of multimodal data. Different types of agreement are illustrated, including true, indirect and apparent agreement.

The paper defines the notion of comment as a communicative act that is not requested by the previous turn and conveys additional information to what has been said before, generally concerning an opinion of its Sender and possibly an evaluation. After distinguishing interpretative versus evaluative comments and focusing on the latter, we characterize a verbal comment as an informative or exclamatory sentence containing an evaluative adjective or other direct or indirect ways to express evaluations. Then, a qualitative study is presented on bodily direct and indirect comments in political debates.

In political persuasion the persuader, beside bearing logical arguments and triggering emotions, must present one’s own image (one’s ethos) of a credible and reliable person, by enhancing three dimensions of it: competence, benevolence and dominance. In a parallel way, s/he may cast discredit on the opponent by criticizing, accusing or insulting on the same three dimensions. The work provides a description and a typology of multimodal discrediting moves focusing on the discrediter’s multimodal behavior. Based on an Italian corpus of political debates the analysis points out which facial expressions, gaze behavior, gestures, postures and prosodic features are used to convey discredit concerning the three target features of competence, benevolence and domi-nance. The qualitative study of discredit signals highlights the close relation with emotions and in this sense particular attention is given to them as triggers of the Audience’s evaluation

The paper provides a conceptual definition of the notions of vagueness and approximation (a lack of detail or precision in the knowledge one has of something), hesitation and hastiness (the act of waiting before, or hurrying up while speaking), and overviews some reasons why people can be vague, approximate, hesitating or hasty. A study is presented in which participants tell a recent dream of theirs, and a qualitative analysis is proposed of the words, gestures and other bodily signals that communicate vagueness, approximation, hesitation, hastiness, and word search during dream-telling, by pointing out their semantic differences and the features that distinguish them.

This work presents a typology of eye closing behaviours based on a semantic taxonomy of communicative signals. The types of eye closing we investigate are blinks, eye-closures and winks performed during political debates. While other studies in the literature attempt to classify blinks and eyeclosures according to their duration or (in)completeness of the closure, our study aims to distinguish between communicative and non communicative types of eye closing, and among the former category, between different meanings possibly conveyed by closing one's eyes. We argue that while winks are always communicative, i.e. they bear a meaning, blinks and eye-closures may have a communicative value too. To analyse eye closing types both an observational and a Speaker's judgement approach are adopted, and the items of eye closings exemplified are classified on the basis of a semantic taxonomy that distinguish signals as to their conveying information on the World, on the Senders mind or on the Sender's Identity.

Persuasion in political discourse is a very popular topic, which raised a lot of debate among researchers. Yet, not so much literature has been devoted to the persuasive impact of facial expression and gaze in persuasion. This paper is an introduction to further research and gives some examples of persuasive gesture and gaze, by trying to prove how important these aspects of communication may be in persuasive political discourse. Also, the focus of the paper is to show how politicians make use of them in order to express positive or negative evaluations about the opponent and thus, raise emotions in the public.

The paper analyzes the move of discrediting the opponent as a means to persuasion in political debates. After analysis of a corpus of political debates, a typology of discrediting strategies is outlined, distinguished in terms of three criteria: the target – the feature of the opponent specifically attacked (dominance, competence, benevolence); the route through which it is attacked – topic, mode or directly the person; and the type of communicative act that conveys the attack (insult,criticism, correction…). The relevance of body signals in discrediting moves is highlighted.

Although, as many scholars state, hierarchical social groups arose in order to manage conflicts among individuals (Sapolsky 1999), it is clear that social stratification may be a source for new conflicts. Thus societies can exist only on condition that an equilibrium between conflicting and cooperative factors is maintained. What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying this balance? Among the models facing this issue, some lay a crucial function on emotional devices. Intuitively it may seem that rational argumentation plays the leading role in negotiation but there is an interesting tradition introduced by Darwin (1872) that highlights the importance of emotions in interactional cohesiveness (Gratch et al. 2006). In this article we discuss the reasons why the hypothesis that a main system grounding the rise of societies and the negotiation of conflicts is represented by emotions seems to be persuasive. Specifically, in a phylogenetic perspective we will make reference to a specific phenomenon characterized by emotional elements that has had an adaptive value in terms of cohesion and cooperation among groups: ritual (Alcorta and Sosis 2005; de Waal and Aureli 1996; de Waal and Lanting 1997). However, some scholars point out that such cohesive property is combined with another opposite feature: namely, the emotional nature of ritual can feed conflict by turning the symbols of groups into sacralized values (Ginges et al. 2007). In this sense, the deep emotions that engender group cohesion are also elements advancing out-group hostility (Wilson 2012). In light of these considerations, the analysis of the emotional components tied to collective rituals gives an interesting interpretation of the relationship between conflicts and integration.