Speaker Eyebrow Raises in the Transition Space Pursuing a Shared Understanding

In this article, we examine a distinctive multimodal phenomenon: a participant, gazing at a recipient, raising both eyebrows upon the completion of their own turn at talk – that is, in the transition space between turns at talk (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974). We find that speakers deploy eyebrow raises in two related but distinct practices. In the first, the eyebrows are raised and held as the speaker presses the recipient to respond to a disaffiliative action (e.g. a challenge); in the second, the eyebrows are raised and quickly released in a so-called eyebrow flash as the speaker invites a response to an affiliative action (e.g. a joke). The former practice is essentially combative, the latter collusive. Although the two practices differ in their durational properties and in the kinds of actions that they serve, they also have something in common: they invoke a shared knowledge or understanding between speaker and recipient.