Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2020

Eye-rolling, irony and embodiment

From the book The Diversity of Irony

  • Herbert L. Colston

Abstract

Eye-rolling is a wide-spread human nonverbal behavior associated with a number of attitudinal positions and corresponding language forms. People commonly roll their eyes, along with a host of related behaviors, for instance, as stand-alone disapproval and other meaningful displays. Eye-rolling is also a frequent accompaniment of verbal irony and other figurative, indirect and direct forms of language also associated with disapproval or other relevant attitudes concerning referent topics. To-date, though, relatively little research has investigated this prevalent human communicative behavior other than some documentations of its common practitioners and discourse residences, including as a form of social aggression and as a complex response by women (demonstrating “contempt”) to sexist humor (Goodwin & Alim, 2010; LaFrance & Woodzicka, 1998; Underwood, 2004). The following chapter accordingly offers a brief overview of some observed parameters of eye-rolling and related behaviors, as well as several potential accounts to explain their usage for disapproval and related displays and as complements of verbal irony. Different ways to frame explorations into eye-rolling as communicative behavior are also provided. An empirical test of one of the proposed accounts, under one of the considered evaluative frameworks is then presented to demonstrate one means of addressing eye-rolling as a complex embodied human communicative behavior. Questions and issues that future research into eye-rolling and ally behaviors are likely to face are then considered.

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
Downloaded on 29.3.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110652246-010/html
Scroll to top button