This dissertation investigates the ubiquitous phenomenon of mockery as a case study of complex stancetaking. The starting point is the observation that stancetaking, the expression of our attitudes toward the world around us, is inherently multimodal. What is missing, however, is a multimodal and interactional analysis of more complex forms of stancetaking. Mockery presents an intriguing case to explore this, as it involves a layered constellation in which a stance on a serious layer is heightened, diminished, or inverted on a non-serious layer.
Using three video corpora of spontaneous triadic interactions between friends, the dissertation examines the role of bodily-visual resources in negotiating stance and nonseriousness in sequences of mockery. 1556 cases of mockery were identified, which were analyzed in three empirical studies on initiating, managing, and elaborating the mockery. Taking a primarily qualitative and sequential approach, these studies show that bodily-visual resources contribute to the negotiation of mockery in interaction: They perform a range of functions, including stancetaking and alignment, managing the participation framework, and depicting and indexing personae. As a whole, this dissertation contributes to the growing body of work on multimodal stancetaking, and provides a basis for a systematic integration of multimodality in the study of humor in interaction.
