Tag: (E) laugh

(2018) English – Conversational humour, keywords

Goddard, Cliff (2018). “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(4),  487-514. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2018-0017

Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives such as jocular and mock are also much used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like.

Against this background, the present paper has three main aims.

In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved by attributing technical meanings to the terms.

Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing, on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humour. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach.

Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humour based on cross-translatable terminology.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2018) Danish – Conversational humour

Levisen, Carsten (2018). Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor. Intercultural Pragmatics, 15(4), 515-531. DOI: 10.1515/ip-2018-0018

This paper explores sort humor ‘black humour’, a key concept in Danish conversational humour. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish
synesthetic humour metaphors that also includes other categories such as tør ‘dry’, syg ‘sick’, and fed ‘fat’. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humour discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices.

The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of ‘blackness’ differs from that of l’humour noir, a category of French surrealism, and English black humour with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular non-sense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of ‘groupy togetherness’.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2014) Emotions / Feelings

Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective. International Journal of Language and Culture, 1(2), 149-173.

DOI: 10.1075/ijolc.1.2.02wie

Abstract:

This paper builds on findings of the author’s 1999 book Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, which tentatively identified eleven universals pertaining to human emotions. The paper probes some of those “emotional universals” further, especially in relation to ‘laughing’, ‘crying’, and ‘pain’. At the same time, the author continues her campaign against pseudo-universals, focusing in particular on the anthropological and philosophical discourse of “suffering”. The paper argues for the Christian origins of the concept of “suffering” lexically embodied in European languages, and contrasts it with the Buddhist concept of ‘dukkha’, usually rendered in Anglophone discussions of Buddhism with the word suffering.

More information:

Reissued as:

Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). “Pain” and “suffering” in cross-linguistic perspective. In Cliff Goddard & Zhengdao Ye (Eds.), “Happiness” and “pain” across languages and cultures (pp. 19-43). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/bct.84.02wie


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2016) English – Verbs of ‘doing and happening’

Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Explicating the English lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. Functions of Language, 23(2), 214-256. DOI: 10.1075/fol.23.2.03god

This study proposes NSM semantic explications for a cross-section of the English verbal lexicon of ‘doing and happening’. The twenty-five verbs are drawn from about a dozen verb classes, including verbs for non-typical locomotion (crawl, swim, fly), other intransitive activities (play, sing), manipulation (hold), activities that affect material integrity (cut, grind, dig), creation/production (make, build, carve), actions that affect people or things (hit, kick, kill) or cause a change of location (pick up, put, throw, push), bodily reactions to feelings (laugh, cry), displacement (fall, sink) and weather phenomena (rain, snow).

Though the verbs explicated are specifically English verbs, they have been chosen with an eye to their relevance to lexical typology and cross-linguistic semantics (many are drawn from the Verb Meanings List of the Leipzig Valency Patterns project) and it is hoped that the analytical strategy and methodology exemplified in this study can be a useful model for research into other languages. The study demonstrates the application of the NSM concept of semantic templates, which provide a clear “skeletal” structure for explications of considerable internal complexity and which help account for shared semantic and grammatical properties of verbs of a given subclass.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2017) English (Australia) – Conversational humour

Goddard, Cliff (2017). Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English. Language & Communication, 55, 55-68. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2016.09.008

This paper argues that the ethnopragmatic approach allows humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to ward off conceptual Anglocentrism. It begins with a semantic inquiry into the word laugh, a plausible lexical universal and an essential anchor point for humour studies. It then demonstrates how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour research. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: funny, amusing, and humour. Cultural scripts are proposed for “jocular abuse”, “deadpan jocular irony” and “jocular deception” in Australian English. The semantic explications and cultural scripts are composed using simple, cross-translatable words.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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