Blurb:

This chapter offers a multimodal perspective on affiliation, considering how body language supports the proposal and negotiation of ideation-attitude couplings in the face-to-face multiparty conversation introduced in the previous chapter. Developing Martin and Zappavigna’s previous work on how embodied identities are enacted in youth justice conferencing and drawing on the previous chapter’s coupling analysis undertaken on the verbal transcript, we explore how body language can illuminate which couplings are central to the social bonding so evidently going on in the video-recorded interaction. This will show just how much work our bodies do to help us affiliate with others and emphasise the vital importance for linguistics of engaging with this embodied form of meaning.