“Double-speak” at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of bisociation in conversational laughter-talk

Abstract

In this paper, I consider whether the theory of bisociation, the sudden shift from one script (or narrative outline), or language mode or register to another, first developed in relation to joke humor, can help shed light on other forms of laughter-talk (defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter), particularly that observed in one form of (semi-)spontaneous discourse, namely White House press briefings.

Two corpora of briefings transcripts were compiled, one from the Democrat era and one from the subsequent Bush administration, and the laughter bouts, along with their contexts and information on speaker and audience kinesics, were collected and transferred into separate laughter files. Not only was it found that several different forms of bisociation play an important role in briefings laughter-talk, but also that these forms are employed to attempt to achieve an intriguing variety of particular rhetorical argumentative aims, from criticizing the President to threatening an opponent's face to winning audience affiliation.

Corpora have only rarely been used to investigate participants' interaction in discourse and still less in studies of laughter-talk or humor interaction. This paper, therefore, is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS).