Synergistic Construction of Expectational Stance and Multimodal Evaluative Meaning: A Linguistics Case Study of the Opus Pon tu pensamiento en mí

Abstract

In both everyday talk and artistic storytelling, speakers rarely put their attitudes or evaluations into words in any direct way. Bringing together ideas from expectancy expectation-basedsociopragmatics, and evaluative meaning research, the study builds a three-part model: Expectation Monitoring, then Cross-Modal Signal Coordination, and finally Stance Emergence. What emerges is that irony, a classic case of an expectational stance strategy, does subtle interpersonal work in the film. Rather than fraying social bonds, it tightens closeness, protects face, and stirs empathy. It acts as a bonding agent instead of a disruptor. The paper also draws attention to the multimodal evaluative meaning set out by Bin Dang ^[1]. In that view, evaluative meaning is not a fixed property parked in one channel but forms piece by piece in time, through cross-channel evaluative tension and synergy. This insight turns out to be important for grasping how stance actually materializes in multimodal settings. Fresh experimental work backs up this cross-modal predictive framework: gestural discourse markers can raise discourse-level expectations even without words ^[2], and iconic co-speech gestures are actively recruited to predict what is coming next, a pattern confirmed by both behavioral and electrophysiological measures ^[3]. Meanwhile, computational studies show that expectancy violation itself, treated as a “surprise” signal, works as an efficient device for steering communication, matching the performance of more complex Theory of Mind approaches without demanding heavy mentalizing ^[4].