Conversational Joking Research Articles

The Use of Tag Questions in Person-centered Communication

Tag questions are imperative, declarative, exclamative or interrogative statements that have been modified to include a question (e.g.., It is hot out, isn’t it?). Tag questions have been characterized as elderspeak because it suggests an expected response from the person with dementia, thus limiting his/her ability to make a decision independently. However, tag questions serve multiple functions in conversation. There is limited research on the multidimensional nature of tag questions in conversations between formal caregivers and their clients with dementia. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate the functions of tag questions used by formal caregivers in utterances coded as person-centered. Conversations (N= 87) between formal caregivers and a simulated person with dementia were video-recorded during a 5-minute care interaction involving morning care. Caregivers’ utterances were coded for the use of the following types of person-centered communication: recognition, negotiation, facilitation, and validation. During secondary data analysis, the person-centered utterances were analyzed for the use and function of tag questions. Conversational analyses revealed two broad functions of tag questions: gather information and facilitate a desired action. Tag questions used to gather information included the following specific functions: acknowledge response, establish common ground, state fact or opinion, initiate topic, conversational joking, state what is being done and questions. Tag questions that facilitated a desired reaction included the following specific functions: offers, advice and suggestions and requests and commands. Findings from the current study reveal that tag questions are not exclusively elderspeak and can be used to illicit conversation.

Interpersonal Touch in Conversational Joking

ABSTRACT This study examines the uses of interpersonal touch in everyday interaction. An examination of everyday interactions among adult Mandarin Chinese speakers shows that sustained touch recurs in conversational jokings in two interactional and sequential environments: sequentially disaligned jokings (i.e., jokings that disrupt the speaker’s ongoing turn- and activity-in-progress) and jokings after extended disagreement. Sustained touch seems to perform several functions in the two environments. In sequentially disaligned jokings, the initiation of touch displays the speaker’s orientation to the concurrent talk as disaligned with the projected talk- and activity-in-progress. Sustained touch secures the recipient’s continuous participation in the sequentially disaligned jokings and requests the recipient’s appreciation of the jokings. After extended disagreement, sustained touch displays intimacy and invites the recipient into intimate interaction with the speaker. In both environments, sustained touch seems to delimit the boundaries of a joking. The data are in Mandarin Chinese with English translation.

Being a good sport: players’ uptake to coaches’ joking in interviews for the youth national team

ABSTRACT This paper draws on detailed analyses of authentic coach-athlete interviews during the final selection camp for the Swedish national youth team in hockey. The audio-recorded interviews between the coaches and the individual players (20 players and two national team coaches) covered various issues, involving both the individual players´ goal-setting and sports character, as displayed in his self-presentation during the interview. If the presumptive elite level player presented a vague or low goal or an overly humble self-presentation, this was contested by the coach through jokes, laughter or ironic teasing. Such conversational joking exchanges formed part of each coach´s toolkit for giving critical feedback to interview questions. In their uptake to the coaches playful corrections, the players were expected to engage in po-faced receipt or to laugh along. The selection involved character contests both on the ice rink and in the talk-in-interaction that formed part of the performance appraisal procedure.

Building identity in humorous media interactions

This article presents an analysis of conversational humour (Attardo 1994) occuring in two Romanian television shows with the purpose of demonstrating that journalists use humour to build their own identity in relation to their interlocutors and to their audience. The types of strategic moves identified in media situational humour are two-fold: one directed at a participant in the conversation, having the potential of biting; the other that is directed at an absent other (in this case, the audience), having the potential of bonding (Boxer and Cortes-Conde 1997, 275). A relational identity is developed among participants in conversational joking which can be identified and described in accordance with the communicative norms and expectations that are considered appropriate in the media context in which individuals interact.

Asymmetry in script opposition

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between targets and script distribution in humour, starting from some basic notions of GTVH. Script asymmetry, considered here as a property of Script Opposition, is defined in terms of a perceptual difference between scripts, which matches a fairly common distribution: a Foreground Script against a Background Script. Throughout this paper, the attributes of this script distribution are explored in verbal jokes, graphic humour and conversational spontaneous joking. This particular script distribution leads to an interesting consequence when overt targets are implied: the set of inferences that we attribute to the target arises regularly from the Foreground Script, the script that closes the joke. If this correlation of script distribution and target attribution holds, we can account for a formal connection between the structure of the joke and its derisive intention.

The Communicative Features of Conversational Joking : Focusing on Style-Shifting Phenomena as Jokes

The Communicative Features of Conversational Joking : Focusing on Style-Shifting Phenomena as Jokes

On Sexism in Conversational Joking

On Sexism in Conversational Joking

Editorial

Editorial

How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures

Abstract An approach to humor grounded in interactional sociolinguistics starts not with reified abstractions such as ‘humor’, ‘wit’, or ‘irony’ but rather with the situated interpretation of joking as a speech activity. Using videotaped data of crosscultural conversation groups, and employing a close linguistic analysis based in Gumperz's theory of conversational inference, this paper documents the ability of beginning language learners to collaborate in the construction of conversational joking discourse with native English speakers. The claim is made that communication is achieved indirectly within these jointly-constructed joking episodes through displaying understanding by playing within the frame set out by the other. Such fine-tuning of understanding is the core of why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport. Illustrative joking episodes represent differences along several dimensions: the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, with examples of primary reliance on the nonverbal and lexical, on the prosodic, and on the pragmatic; the interactional roles of the native English speaker and learner(s), with examples of different patterns of initiation and collaboration; and the focus of the joking within the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience, in effect, the culture of the language learner, with examples highlighting the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions, the difficulty of coping with interaction in the new language, and the general powerlessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers.

Conversational dynamics of humour: the telephone game in Greek

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.

Issues in conversational joking

In this article, I explore the main theoretical issues facing researchers in conversational humor today. In particular, I address (1) the structure of humorous discourse; (2) the forms of conversational humor: jokes, anecdotes, wordplay, irony; (3) the interpersonal functions of conversational humor: aggression versus rapport; (4) single-stage versus multi-stage processing of humor; and (5) the description of timing in word play and narrative jokes.

From bonding to biting: Conversational joking and identity display

Teasing and joking are instruments by which social control is exerted and through which social identity is displayed. Situational humor, or conversational joking — especially teasing — has been seen as a double-edged sword that both diffuses and controls conflict. Little attention has been given, though, to the bonding role of joking. Through an ethnography of speaking approach, we examine conversational joking among interlocutors in two different speech communities. The data shows that there are two types of moves in joking: one that is directed at a participant in the conversation, having the potential of biting; the other that is directed at an absent other, having the potential of bonding. We compare types of situational humor with particular attention to interlocutor variables. Joking used to perform social identity is most strongly determined by the gender of participants and social distance between them. Conversational joking does not act only as a means of social control and identity display, but also functions to develop a relational identity among participants.

Impoliteness and Conversational Joking: On Relational Politics

In this article the attempt is made to conceptualize politeness as a processual interaction phenomenon whose power to define social relationships is observable in humorous exchanges. Politeness and face-work are differentiated ; I distinguish between marked positive and negative politeness and other forms of relational work. On the basis of conversational data I show specific socially indicative potentials of humorous communication. Humor can definitely be used to cushion face-threats and to communicate polite non-imposition or polite approval. However, good friends are especially likely to overstep the boundaries of politeness. In most models of politeness humorous activities are counted as forms of positive politeness, which is equated with familiarity and solidarity. Humorous communication in fact plays a role in the conversational constitution of familiarity and informality - but familiarity and informality should not be confused with politeness. Despite clear impoliteness, many humorous provocations (teasing, ribbing, making fun of someone, pulling someone's leg) still have a relationship-affirming character. An internal differentiation among the activities listed by Brown and Levinson under the rubric of positive politeness enables us to go beyond the two-step model of distance (off record, negative politeness) and solidarity (positive politeness)

Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk

Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk

Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk

Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk

Conversational joking: Humor in everyday talk By Neal R. Norrick (review)

Conversational joking: Humor in everyday talk By Neal R. Norrick (review)