Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English

Abstract

This paper argues that the ethnopragmatic approach allows humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to ward off conceptual Anglocentrism. It begins with a semantic inquiry into the word ‘laugh’, a plausible lexical universal and an essential anchor point for humour studies. It then demonstrates how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour research. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: ‘funny’, ‘amusing’, and ‘humour’. Cultural scripts are proposed for “jocular abuse”, “deadpan jocular irony” and “jocular deception” in Australian English. The semantic explications and cultural scripts are composed using simple, cross-translatable words.