5 Facial gestures and laughter as a resource for negotiating humor in conversation
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Béatrice Priego-Valverde
Abstract
This chapter focuses on interactional humor in dyadic face-to-face conversations in French. Adopting an expanded version of the Smiling Intensity Scale (Gironzetti et al. 2016; Gironzetti, Attardo, and Pickering 2016), this chapter focuses on participants’ facial gestures (i.e., neutral facial expressions and smiles) and laughter in the 11 interactions of the “Cheese!” corpus. The aim of this article is to investigate the way both the speaker’s and the recipient’s multimodal behaviors are used as a resource for producing, reacting to, and negotiating humorous utterances. Using a mixed approach, the aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to provide a statistical analysis based on the whole corpus which highlights general trends about the way neutral facial expressions, smiles, and laughter are displayed in humorous segments; (2) to provide a deeper understanding of the multimodal achievement of humor in conversation through a sequential analysis of three examples. With these complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches, we will show that while a quantitative analysis can illustrate the way humor is accompanied by nonverbal behaviors, only a sequential analysis allows us to consider them as a resource used by participants to produce, react to, and negotiate humor.
Abstract
This chapter focuses on interactional humor in dyadic face-to-face conversations in French. Adopting an expanded version of the Smiling Intensity Scale (Gironzetti et al. 2016; Gironzetti, Attardo, and Pickering 2016), this chapter focuses on participants’ facial gestures (i.e., neutral facial expressions and smiles) and laughter in the 11 interactions of the “Cheese!” corpus. The aim of this article is to investigate the way both the speaker’s and the recipient’s multimodal behaviors are used as a resource for producing, reacting to, and negotiating humorous utterances. Using a mixed approach, the aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to provide a statistical analysis based on the whole corpus which highlights general trends about the way neutral facial expressions, smiles, and laughter are displayed in humorous segments; (2) to provide a deeper understanding of the multimodal achievement of humor in conversation through a sequential analysis of three examples. With these complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches, we will show that while a quantitative analysis can illustrate the way humor is accompanied by nonverbal behaviors, only a sequential analysis allows us to consider them as a resource used by participants to produce, react to, and negotiate humor.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
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Part 1: Face-to-face interactions
- 1 A multimodal approach to children’s development of humor in family life 15
- 2 On target. On the role of eye-gaze during teases in face-to-face multiparty interaction 53
- 3 Humorous Smiling: A Reverse Cross-Validation of the Smiling Intensity Scale for the Identification of Conversational Humor 87
- 4 Alternative conceptualizations of the Smiling Intensity Scale (SIS) and their applications to the identification of humor 109
- 5 Facial gestures and laughter as a resource for negotiating humor in conversation 131
- 6 Multimodal humor in human-robot interaction 169
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Part 2: Mediated interactions
- 7 Facial expressions as multimodal markers of humor: More evidence from scripted and non-scripted interactions 209
- 8 Emojis and jocular flattery in Chinese instant messaging interactions 231
- 9 More than laughter: Multimodal humour and the negotiation of ingroup identities in mobile instant messaging interactions 263
- 10 Humour and creativity in a family of strangers on Facebook 289
- 11 “Loanword translation and corrective acts are incongruous”: Debating metapragmatic stereotypes through humorous memes 319
- Index 355
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Introduction 1
-
Part 1: Face-to-face interactions
- 1 A multimodal approach to children’s development of humor in family life 15
- 2 On target. On the role of eye-gaze during teases in face-to-face multiparty interaction 53
- 3 Humorous Smiling: A Reverse Cross-Validation of the Smiling Intensity Scale for the Identification of Conversational Humor 87
- 4 Alternative conceptualizations of the Smiling Intensity Scale (SIS) and their applications to the identification of humor 109
- 5 Facial gestures and laughter as a resource for negotiating humor in conversation 131
- 6 Multimodal humor in human-robot interaction 169
-
Part 2: Mediated interactions
- 7 Facial expressions as multimodal markers of humor: More evidence from scripted and non-scripted interactions 209
- 8 Emojis and jocular flattery in Chinese instant messaging interactions 231
- 9 More than laughter: Multimodal humour and the negotiation of ingroup identities in mobile instant messaging interactions 263
- 10 Humour and creativity in a family of strangers on Facebook 289
- 11 “Loanword translation and corrective acts are incongruous”: Debating metapragmatic stereotypes through humorous memes 319
- Index 355
