Some Uses of Head Tilts and Shoulder Shrugs during Human Interaction, and Their Relation to Stancetaking

When people engage in discussion or debate, they do not only use spoken language to position themselves in the course of interaction: they use their bodies as well. In this paper, we take a systematic, corpus-based, bottom-up linguistic approach rooted in gesture studies and interactional linguistics to account for the possible functions of two types of gesture during stance taking in the course of human-human interaction: lateral head tilts and shoulder shrugs. The absolute or contextual direction of head tilts does not seem directly relevant to stance taking, but rather related to the pragmatic deictic function of abstract pointing. Shoulder shrugs can work as markers of "dis-stance" or disengagement, in which case they take on an epistemic-evidential dimension. Both gestures tend to be used when the gesturer either disaffiliates with third party positionings, or affiliates with his/her interlocutor's stances.