TITLE:
Affect-Loaded Questions in Japanese Storytelling: An Analysis of Grammar, Prosody, and Body Movements of Story Recipients’ Questions
AUTHORS:
Chisato Koike
KEYWORDS:
Affect, Questions, Storytelling, Affiliation, Japanese Conversations
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.5 No.5,
October
29,
2015
ABSTRACT: The present study explores
affective stance in conversational storytelling by investigating the ways in which
unknowing story recipients display affective stances toward a teller’s story through
questions that deploy multimodal resources. The data are based on videotaped natural
face-to-face conversations between native Japanese speakers. While unknowing story
recipients ask questions of the storyteller only to elicit factual information (“neutral
questions”), they also ask questions layered with affect (“affect-loaded questions”).
Building on studies on affect and stance, assessment, questions, and alignment and
affiliation in storytelling, I demonstrate how unknowing story recipients ask affect-loaded
questions to elicit and display affective stances toward story contents by exploiting
linguistic and non-linguistic resources. First, I explicate how unknowing story
recipients employ not only linguistic devices (e.g., emotion words, wh-questions,
and deictic expressions such as sonna “like that”), but also prosody, facial expressions, body movements, and pre-/concurrent-laughter
in order to load questions with affective stance that display, for example, disgust,
humor, sarcasm, criticism, or surprise. Secondly, I show how unknowing story recipients
use rhetorical questions to express their affect (rather than to elicit information
from the storyteller). Thirdly, I demonstrate how affiliation of affective stance
between storyteller and unknowing story recipients influences the trajectory of
storytelling and how the participants negotiate their affective stances. This study
sheds light on the interactional process of how participants in talk-in-interaction
display affective stance through a range of multimodal resources, by examining how
unknowing story recipients ask affect-loaded questions of the storyteller. It illuminates
the social practice of story recipients’ active participation in storytelling activity
that is embedded in social interaction, through their use of questions that dynamically
co-construct and negotiate affective stance.