Geert Brône
Title: Humour and embodied stance in interaction
Biodata: Geert Brône is professor of German and general linguistics at Linguistics Department of KU Leuven (Belgium). He is a member of the MIDI Research Group (‘Multimodality, Interaction & Discourse’), which studies the relationship between verbal and nonverbal resources (such as gesture, gaze and facial expressions) from different theoretical and methodological angles. Ever since his PhD project, in which he developed a cognitive-semantic account of irony and sarcasm in interaction, he has had a keen interest in exploring frameworks and methods for the multimodal analysis of humour in different types of interaction. Over the past 10 years, an important methodological focus of his research has been the development of mobile eye-tracking technology as a tool for multimodal interaction analysis. These systems allow for the fine-grained recording of participants’ gaze behavior while engaged in face-to-face interaction, opening up a whole new field of research possibilities in different (neighboring) fields. In his plenary talk, Geert Brône will present the results of ongoing research that explores the relationship between gaze and other embodied resources in the expression of interpersonal stance in interaction, which is generally considered to be an important driving force for humour.