Haugh, Michael, & Weinglass, Lara. (2020). “The Great Australian Pastime”: Pragmatic and Semantic Perspectives on Taking the Piss. In Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters, & Lauren Sadow (Eds.), Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Vol. 1. Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis (pp. 75-94). Singapore: Springer.
Abstract
The claim that Australians place considerable value on not taking oneself too seriously lies at the heart of discourses on Anglo-Australian identity. While laughter and playful talk are ubiquitous across languages and cultures, Australians are claimed to pride themselves on being able to joke and laugh at themselves (and others) in almost any context, no matter how dire or serious the circumstances appear to be. One of the key practices that has often been noted is that of ‘taking the piss’, where the pretensions of others are (gleefully) punctured through cutting, mocking remarks. Yet despite its apparent importance for Australians, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of actual instances of it. This lacuna is arguably a consequence of the complexity of studying a phenomenon that is simultaneously semantic and pragmatic in character. Ethnopragmatics is one of the few extant approaches that is specifically designed to directly tackle this problem. In this approach, ‘semantic explications’, which address what a word or phrase means, provide the basis for proposing ‘cultural scripts’, which address what members of a culture are held to (normatively) do in social interaction and the cultural value placed on doing things in that way. In this chapter, we analyse data drawn from spoken corpora to address the question of whether “taking the piss” might be best approached as a kind of ‘semantic explication’ or as a ‘cultural script’, and what the consequences of framing it as one or other might be for research on the role of ‘humour’ more generally in social interaction amongst Australian speakers of English.
