Tijdschrift
Studies van de Belgische Kring voor Linguïstiek, vol. 16 (2022)
Auteur(s)
Katharina Meissl, Paul Sambre en Kurt Feyaerts (KULeuven)
Abstract
On the background of the increased interest in the phenomenon of stance-taking (i.a. Englebretson 2007, Debras 2015) this contribution explores the notion of contrast pairs (Weeks 1996, Messner 2020) as it is instantiated in orchestra instruction during rehearsal, an inherently stance-laden activity given its focus on evaluating and improving the musicians’ collective performance. Contrast pairs are sequences of closely juxtaposed depictions (Clark 2016, or “illustrative expressions” in Weeks 1996), which serve the instructional comparison of undesired and desired (orchestral) performances. In this contribution, we report on an exploratory analysis of a corpus of approximately ten hours of video recordings of orchestra rehearsals (Schrooten & Feyaerts 2020). Through a close reading of two examples, we shed light on the sequential and multimodal complexity of contrast pairs and identify steps for further analysis. We argue that, due to their evaluative and contrastive nature, contrast pairs offer valuable grounds to contribute to the study of multimodal stance-taking in interaction.