Responding to Conversational Humour in Intercultural Initial Interaction

Conversational humour, which broadly encompasses (sequences of) utterances designed to 'amuse' participants or treated as 'amusing' by participants across various kinds of social interaction (Bell, 2015), has been the object of study in pragmatics and other related fields for a number of decades.

Scholars have explored various facets of humour, including its social functions, linguistic mechanisms, and psychological impacts. However, a relatively less explored aspect is humour responses – that is, how individuals react to humour in their interactional environments.

In this talk, Amir presents a framework for studying humour in its interactive context, a model that focuses on the sequential trajectory of humour in interaction. The data draws from the Corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations (ViMEF) and a collection of video recordings of intercultural initial interaction in English (IIIE).

Using the framework of interactional pragmatics, an approach to the analysis of pragmatic phenomena informed by research and methods in ethno-methodological conversation analysis (Arundale, 2010; Haugh, 2015), the analysis focuses on the design of humour episodes and the sequential environment in which conversational humour accomplishes its effects.

Within this model, humour can be responded to in five distinct sequential environments, and the choice of response to humour is, in part, motivated by the epistemics, such as negotiated or claimed knowledge and affiliation in interaction.

Date

Friday 9 August 2024

Time

1 to 2 pm

Location

Online via Zoom

Speaker

Dr Amir Sheikhan
The University of Queensland

Suggested pre-reading

Arundale, R. B. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, facework, and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(8), 2078-2105.

Bell, N. (2015). We are not amused: Failed humor in interaction. Walter de Gruyter.

Haugh, M. (2015). Impoliteness and taking offence in initial interactions. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 36-42.