Abstract
The present article is part of a larger cross-cultural research project on speaker-hearer smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous conversations in American English and French. The American corpus consists of eight computer-mediated interactions between English native speakers, and the French one consists of four face-to-face interactions between French native speakers. The goal of the study is twofold: first, we analyze the link between smiling and humor, focusing on the degree of synchronicity of smiling and the intensity of smiling during humorous and non-humorous segments; second, we investigate the various targets mobilized in conversational humor. The results obtained comparing the two data-sets show a correlation between the presence of humor, an increased smiling intensity, and an increase in the synchronized smiling behaviors displayed by participants. However, the two corpora also differ in terms of the displayed smiling behaviors: French participants display more non-synchronic smiling when humor is absent and more synchronic smiling when humor is present. Regarding the various targets of humor (Speaker, Recipient, Other person, Situation, Speaker+Recipient), while their distribution is different – it is more evenly distributed in the French data – the way in which these are mobilized in order to become humorous is quite similar.
About the authors
Béatrice Priego-Valverde is a lecturer (Aix-Marseille Université and Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS, Aix en Provence, France). Working within Interactional Linguistics approach, her main topic of research is humor in conversations. On the basis of naturally occurring data (everyday conversations among close acquaintances) she focuses her analyzes on the ways humor is produced by the speaker and on the reactions it triggers, both positive and negative. At the same time, a more controlled data (audio and video recorded), allows studies on multimodal aspects of humor.
Brigitte Bigi is a researcher at LPL(Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, France). Graduate in Computer Science, her research focuses on corpus creation and annotation of speech recordings. She is the author and developer of SPPAS: Automatic Annotation of Speech, which includes 7 automatic annotation components (Momel and INTSINT, IPUs segmentation, Tokenization, Phonetization, Forced-Alignement, Syllabification, and Repetitions detection).
Salvatore Attardo is a professor of Linguistics at Texas A&M University-Commerce. He has authored two monographs (Linguistic Theories of Humor, 1994, and Humorous Texts, 2001. For ten years, he was the editor-in-chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. He edited the Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (Sage, 2014) and the Handbook of Language and Humor (Routledge, 2017).
Lucy Pickering is a professor of applied linguistics and director of the applied linguistics laboratory at Texas A&M-Commerce. Her research program is focused on aspects of spoken discourse including prosodic development in L2 learners, intonation in discourse and humor in discourse. In 2018 she published Discourse Intonation: A discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the pronunciation of English with Michigan University Press. She is co-editor of the 2016 volume Talking at work: Corpus-based explorations of workplace discourse with Palgrave Macmillan. She has also been published in a wide range of journals including TESOL Quarterly, Modern Language Journal, Discourse Processes, Discourse Studies, Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Pragmatics & Cognition, World Englishes, and English for Specific Purposes.
Elisa Gironzetti is assistant professor of Spanish applied linguistics at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on humor, pragmatics and language teaching, and Hispanic applied linguistics. She is the founding editor of E-JournALL and associate editor of the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching. She has co-edited the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching: Metodología, contextos y recursos para la enseñanza and is now conducting experimental research on humor integrating eye-tracking, FACS, and discourse analysis.
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Appendix 1: Transcription conventions
Conventions used for French transcriptions
@: Laughter
@@word@@: Word produced while laughing
↑: Rising intonation
Underlined word: Overlap
*: inaudible
Conventions used for American English transcriptions
//: beginning or ending of a pause unit
Capital letters: prominent syllable
(( )): additional information like laughter, throat
???: inaudible
Appendix 2: Jokes
Frog joke
An engineer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, “If you kiss me, I’ll turn into a beautiful princess.”
He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week.”
The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, “If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I’ll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want.”
Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, “What is the matter? I’ve told you I’m a beautiful princess that I’ll stay with you for a week and do anything you want. Why won’t you kiss me?”
The engineer said, “Look I’m an engineer. I don’t have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that’s cool.”
Donkey joke
A car was involved in an accident in a street. As expected a large crowd gathered. A newspaper reporter, anxious to get his story could not get near the car.
Being a clever sort, he started shouting loudly, "Let me through! Let me through! I am the son of the victim."
The crowd made way for him.
Lying in front of the car was a donkey.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
