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Part of
A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament
Edited by Catalina Fuentes Rodríguez and Gloria Álvarez-Benito
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 68] 2016
► pp. 161–193

Chapter 8
Gender differences in eye-contact behaviour in parliamentary discourse

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the main functions of eye-contact in the Andalusian Parliament (Committee for Equality and Social Welfare). The corpus consists of 12 oral questions (from March to September 2010) raised by the two main political parties. The study focuses on three aspects: 1) turn-types; 2) political allegiance; 3) gender differences. Regarding turn-types, the results showed that longer eye-contact tended to be more frequent in the second turns. Concerning political allegiance, eye-contact was used as a means to signalling affiliation and loyalty towards the Regional Minister. Regarding gender differences, men seemed to keep more eye-contact than women.

Keywords: Eye-contact, Andalusian Parliament, oral questions, turn-type, political colour, gender, non-verbal devices, regulators, power relations, face
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Technical material
    • 3.2Procedures
  • 4.Turn-type: prepared in advance versus spontaneous questions
  • 5.Political colour: ruling party versus opposition party
  • 6.Gender differences
  • 7.Functions of eye-contact
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.68.09alv
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