Conversational dynamics of humour: the telephone game in Greek

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to investigate humorous exchanges in Greek telephone conversation openings in the light of Raskin’s (Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. D. Reidel, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster) and Attardo’s (Attardo, Salvatore, 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin; Attardo, Salvatore, 2001. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin) semantico-pragmatic theories of humour and the principles of conversation analysis regarding telephone interaction [Sacks, Harvey, 1995. In: Jefferson, G. (Ed.), Lectures on Conversation, Vols I and II. Blackwell, Oxford (1963, 1970, 1972) (reprint) and Schegloff, Emanuel A., 1972. Sequencing in conversational openings. In: Gumperz, J.J. and Hymes, D. (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, pp. 346–380 (1968) (reprint)]. The material analysed (268 humorous exchanges between young adults) shows that such interactions are understood as a game, with interlocutors negotiating and co-constructing tacit rules involving a deliberate attack on social and linguistic conventions while at the same time creating a new code pertaining to in-group members only. The exchanges examined involve wordplay, insincere enquiries, complaints and reprimands. Wordplay in natural conversation has been attributed both an aggressive and a disruptive function (Norrick, Neal R., 1993. Conversational Joking. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis). Our data point to degrees of disruption, in that despite the playfulness of the exchanges, the canonical pattern including preemptive moves is preserved in most cases. Aggression, on the other hand, is also shown to be scalar and to serve primarily bonding purposes. In the light of the findings we propose a bridge between the GTVH, CA and politeness theory (Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), with accompanying modifications considered necessary to account for this type of data and possibly for dialogic material of other types.