Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Laughters: Correlating two Contexts

Abstract

Laughter is a pervasive human behavior that is frequently transcribed into written texts as ‘laughter onomatopoeia’ (LO), to represent the sound of laughter and various emotions within a specific context. Particularly, LO have a rich pragmatic impact on the facilitating of communications (Xia 2021). A such, this study discusses the LO of animation in texts in Chinese contexts, and erects a comparison with its translation into Japanese. In particular, the study focuses on the analysis of the interjection and sentence-final particle as discourse markers in both languages and both cultural contexts. The results of the study suggest that speakers of both Chinese and Japanese employ various LOs to in their pragmatic application of their respective languages, yet these LOs differ between the two languages. For example, in the Chinese context, LOs depicting laughter in social interaction can signify the intention to maintain friendly relations, or to resolve problematic interactions. In the Japanese context, however, speakers laregely avoid LO, as such discourse can increase tensions and antagonism between interlocutors.