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 tha