Jocular self-deprecation in Japanese initial interactions

Abstract

Research into conversational humour has found its significant role across a wide range of interactional settings, but to date, only a limited body of studies have investigated the use of conversational humour in initial interactions between interactants who are not previously acquainted. Moreover, no previous studies have investigated the use of conversational humour in Japanese initial interactions, perhaps due to the assumption that humour is only employed in interactions between people with close relationships in Japanese contexts. Preliminary inspections of a dataset of initial interactions in Japanese indicated the prevalence of jocular self-deprecation, where Japanese interactants humorously disparage themselves. Using the framework of interactional pragmatics, this study investigates how jocular self-deprecations are locally situated, co-constructed, and sequentially accomplished in Japanese initial interactions. This empirical study draws on a dataset of twenty face-to-face initial interactions between Japanese university students (approximately 6.5 hours of audio recordings) retrieved from BTSJ Corpus (Usami, 2022). Japanese interactants strategically construct jocular self-deprecations in achieving various relational goals. Given that study on conversational humour in both Japanese settings and initial interactional settings are still scarce, the findings contribute to the variability of this research body, thereby contributing to a broader understanding of the (socio)pragmatics of conversational humour.