Does Gaga ‘live for the applause’? Or, is it more of a ‘Poker Face’?

As one of the best-selling pop artists of our time, Lady Gaga is a name few would fail to recognise. From ‘Poker Face’ to ‘Telephone’, her artistry has earned her a level of notoriety comparable only to a few other music legends. Along with her success, she’s built a loyal fanbase that she affectionately refers to as the ‘Little Monsters’. At shows, she often invites her ‘Little Monsters’ on stage, whilst at other times, she’s surprised her fans by appearing at a movie premier. Here, Lady Gaga appears to navigate between her identity as an international superstar whilst simultaneously appealing to her fans to recognise her as an ‘ordinary person’. But, how does Gaga manage these apparently conflicting identities and what linguistic devices does she use to achieve this? In her 2018 paper, Mary-Caitlyn Valentinsson decided to find out:

To examine the ways in which Gaga navigates the ‘ordinary person’ and ‘celebrity superstar’ identities, Valentinsson examines tweets sent by Gaga aimed at her fans and transcripts taken from media interviews with Gaga.

A group of Lady Gaga's superfans - her 'Little Monsters'

Central to Valentinsson’s analysis are the concepts of stance and stance-taking. These two terms describe two aspects of communication. The term ‘stance’ refers to the way that people align or position themselves in relation to some object, person or idea. So when a speaker expresses their attitude towards something, that speaker is taking a stance. The notion of stance-taking refers to the actual process of making that alignment, which is usually achieved through communication. For instance, if you said, ‘I don’t like cheese’, you'd be taking a stance that you ‘don’t like the dairy goodness of cheese’. The Stance-taking bit would be you actually saying those words.

To examine Lady Gaga’s stances in relation to her fans and journalists, Valentinsson first turns to Gaga’s Twitter account where she observes that Gaga often creates a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary people’. She does this through a number of linguistic strategies. For instance, in one tweet aimed at her fans, Gaga uses terms usually associated with the family (‘mommy’, ‘kids’, ‘mother’) to take a stance of intimacy that allows her to align with her fans. In another tweet, which references the two awards that Gaga won at the People’s Choice Awards, she uses the third-person pronoun ‘we’ in the sentence: ‘we won two people’s choice awards’ to include her fans as recipients of the awards. In other contexts, Gaga uses the @ function of Twitter to ‘speak’ to her fans directly, referencing an awareness of issues effecting her fans in real life. Together, these ‘strategies’ allow Lady Gaga to create a stance of alignment with her fans, rejecting her celebrity status, therefore presenting herself as an ‘ordinary person’. 

             

In interviews with journalists, however, Valentinsson observes an altogether different set of strategies used by Gaga. In these contexts, Gaga adopts a relatively confrontational stance. She does this by refusing to answer questions she deems inappropriate or correcting journalists’ comments about her stage performance. For instance, in one interview, asked whether the sexual references in her songs would negatively influence her record sales, Gaga responds by confronting the interviewer with her achievement of selling 4 million records. Valentinsson argues that, by taking these stances, Gaga explicitly creates a stance of disalignment with the ‘media enterprise’ and reinforces her earlier identity as an ‘ordinary person’.

Concluding, Valentinsson argues that Gaga maintains an ‘ordinary persona’ by engaging in stance taking moves that emphasise her alignment with her fans above all other audiences. So, it seems, at least Gaga is not a ‘Judas’ afterall and she’s certainly not as ‘Shallow’ as the media would like you to believe…

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Valentinsson, Mary-Caitlyn (2018). Stance and the construction of authentic celebrity persona. Language in Society 47, 715–740.

doi:10.1017/S0047404518001100

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

C'mon, give us a smile

As we know from our everyday lives, a smile can indicate many things (amusement, irony and agreement, to name a few).  However, Timo Kaukomaa, Anssi Peräkylä and Johanna Ruusuvuori were interested in researching smile production at a specific point in conversation – the smiles we make in a silence or a break in an interaction.  They note that the silent moments between two spoken utterances are ‘transitional spaces’, and that a smile produced by a speaker in one of these spaces can be seen as a ‘turn-opening smile’.  These turn-opening smiles, Kaukomaa et al. explain, project the onset of talk and can be analysed (along with other facial expressions) from two different perspectives:

1) facial expressions as an indication of inner emotional states and processes (such as a smile to show happiness)

2) facial expressions as a means of serving particular functions in interpersonal communication (such as a smile to show affiliation or solidarity).

The approach they adopt is the second of these, as they believe that turn-opening smiles, which were consistently backed up by prosodic and lexical features, perform a particular function in conversation.  In order to analyse the role that turn-opening smiles play, they video recorded five conversations in Finland between two people as they ate lunch and chatted with each other.

Following the analysis of the thirty turn-opening smiles which were present in the data, two main observations were made:  a) each turn-opening smile seemed to initiate a shift in the conversation from a neutral/ serious tone to a more positive humorous tone and, b) all of the smiles were reciprocated by the recipient.

The first observation highlights how a speaker is able to ‘make light’ of the topic that is being discussed or has previously been discussed.  One example Kaukomaa et al. use to illustrate this is an interaction between two female speakers discussing the possibility that a boy that one of girls is interested in may have lied about his age.  The discussion in the initial stages of description is quite delicate.  However, there is then a silence in which the speaker, who has shown an interest in the boy, smiles. She follows this with a comment relating to how, after you reach a certain age, you are more likely to lie about your age. In this exchange, the smile represents the turning point between a serious or frank tone of discussion to a lighter, more humorous tone, where the girls make light of the boy’s potential dishonesty.

The other point of note in this exchange, as well as all the others identified by the researchers, is that the recipient of the smile always joins in and smiles back. However, Kaukomaa et al note that there is a continuum of response times between an immediate reciprocation (i.e. before the speaker has followed up the smile with an utterance) and reciprocation once the speaker has validated the new humorous tone through the content of what they go on to say.  These two extremes have implications for the relationship between the speakers as well as the speakers’ relationship to the content of the interaction.  For example, an immediately reciprocated smile may indicate that the recipient of the smile trusts that the speaker is going to establish a more humorous stance or say something with which they are likely to agree.  On the other hand, a delayed return of a smile may show that the recipient is unsure of the speaker’s intentions, or is waiting to be ‘let in on the joke’ if a story is being introduced with which they are not familiar.

In conclusion, Kaukomaa et al. suggest that turn-opening smiles are unlike those facial expressions which are labelled ‘emotional contagions’.  These are, for example, smiles which are copied or mimicked automatically.  Instead, they perform an important role in the organisation of conversation and emotional projection across subsequent discourse.

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Kaukomaa, T., Peräkylä, A. and Ruusuvuori, J. (2013) Turn-opening smiles: Facial expression constructing emotional transition in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 55:21 - 42 

DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2013.05.006

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Getting on together in conversation

we communicate through gestures too!

When we talk, the nods, gestures, posture and body movements that we make convey important messages to our conversational partners. They can help in understanding meaning and can show whose turn it is to speak next. They can also display how we feel about the person we’re talking to.

Mary Lavelle, Patrick Healey and Rosemarie McCabe confirm that nodding and hand gestures affect the amount of interpersonal rapport that people experience when they are talking to each other. They set up an experiment where 40 groups of three people were asked to do the ‘balloon task’. This task is a good way of getting people to talk to each other: they are asked to imagine that a hot air balloon is losing height and about to crash. The only way for anyone to survive is for one of the three passengers to jump to a certain death. The three passengers are a cancer scientist, a pregnant primary school teacher and her husband, who is also the pilot. The task of the group is to decide which of the three should make the jump. The conversations in the groups lasted about five and a half minutes, and each participant then rated on a ten point scale the level of rapport they had felt with their conversational partners.

They were not told, however, that in half of the groups one of the participants was suffering from schizophrenia, a condition that apart from its other symptoms often means patients use less non-verbal communication than expected.

During the conversations the patients with schizophrenia spoke less than the healthy participants, and they used fewer gestures when speaking and fewer nods when listening. The more severe their schizophrenic symptoms, the less often they nodded when listening, thus giving fewer indicators of understanding to their partners. Interestingly, the conversational partners compensated by gesturing more when they were speaking themselves, perhaps because they assumed the patients had not been paying attention or were not understanding well. This shows, then, how we adapt our nonverbal cues to the behavior of others during the flow of conversation.

The experiment also showed that gestures in themselves are not enough to achieve interpersonal understanding. Patients with more severe symptoms gestured more when speaking but this (together with more negative symptoms and poorer social cognition) resulted in their partners giving poorer ratings for interpersonal rapport. The researchers point out that gestures were measured mechanically, in terms of speed, so the total number may have included movements that were not helpful to communication (scratching, for example, or displacement behavior). They also note that successful communication relies on gestures that are relevant to communication being well coordinated with speech: if patients are not able to harmonize their verbal and nonverbal features, this would impact on others’ experience of rapport with them.

This exploratory study shows how people’s nonverbal behavior and experience of interpersonal rapport changes in response to the behavior of a schizophrenic patient even when they are unaware of their diagnosis. It has implications therefore for therapy designed to combat the social isolation that tends to accompany this illness. More generally, it shows how important nonverbal communication is for establishing rapport between conversational partners, and how we design the nonverbal cues we use in the flow of conversation in response to those used by others.

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Lavelle, Mary, Healey, Patrick G.T., and McCabe, Rosemarie (2013). Is nonverbal communication disrupted in interactions involving patients with schizophrenia? Schizophrenia Bulletin 39 (5): 1150-1158

doi 10.0193/schbul/sbs091

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire