Semantic components of laughter behavior: a lexical field study of 14 translations of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
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Elisa Gironzetti
Elisa Gironzetti is Assistant Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics at the University of Maryland (USA), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language and culture and Hispanic applied linguistics and coordinates the undergraduate Spanish language program. Her research and publications focus on Spanish as a second/heritage language, second language pedagogy, conversational humor, pragmatics, and multimodality. She recently published the book
The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor (John Benjamins, 2021).
,
Christian F. Hempelmann
Christian F. Hempelmann is editor-in-chief of HUMOR, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at Texas A&M University–Commerce, Director of the Ontological Semantic Technology Lab, and works mainly on (the (computational) linguistics of) humor.
Adel Aldawsari is Vice Dean of the Arabic Language Institute at King AbdulAziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He received his PhD from Texas A&M University Commerce in 2019 with a dissertation on
The Humor-Related Role of English Code-Switching in Arabic Scripted Monologic Acts .Sarvenaz Balali is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Texas A&M University-Commerce specializing in applied linguistics. Sarvenaz holds a master’s degree in linguistics and a Bachelor of Arts in English translation. She has researched the linguistics of humor with a special focus on phonological correspondence in Farsi puns. She has presented her research on semantic and phonological features of Farsi puns in local as well as international conferences.
Władysław Chłopicki is Professor of Linguistics and Translation at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is past president of the ISHS, and a founding editor of the European Journal of Humour Research and Tertium Linguistic Journal. His academic interests include interdisciplinary humor research in the context of cognitive linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, narratology, and cultural studies, (most recently humor in the public sphere – humorinpublic.eu). He authored numerous articles mainly related to humor studies and a Polish-language monograph humor research. He also co-edited more than a dozen monographs on humor, inter-cultural communication, communication styles and linguistics, including
Humorous Discourse (De Gruyter 2017) andPolish Humour (Tertium 2012).
,
Hilal Ergül
Hilal Ergül is an Assistant Professor at the University of Northern Iowa where she teaches applied linguistics and TESOL courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her main research interests include second language acquisition, specifically language teachers’ error correction practices and their effectiveness for learners, and pragmatics, focusing mainly on politeness and humor.
Meichan Huang is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Syracuse University. Her research interests include second-language speech perception and production, prosody, and World Englishes. Her current research explored the role of prosodic features in intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness judgments of speakers from different language backgrounds, as well as pronunciation instruction in higher education. She is also interested in NLP projects on speech recognition and semantic fields.
Liisi Laineste is a senior researcher at the Department of Folkloristics of the Estonian Literary Museum and the Center for Excellence in Estonian Studies, where she is the head of the working group of contemporary culture and media. Her main research pertains to folk humour and its online manifestations. She has published articles and edited books and journal issues on ethnic humour, visual forms of humour (e.g., caricatures and memes), digital folklore and online communication, many of which represent an interdisciplinary angle and combine folkloristics with linguistics, psychology, sociology, and communication studies.
Dr. Shigehito Menjo graduated from A&M-Commerce with a Ph.D. in English with a specialty in Applied Linguistics in 2018. For his dissertation, he studied the acquisition of English prosody (intonation and stress) by Japanese learners of English and contributed new understanding to the field of second language development. In Fall 2018, Dr. Menjo joined the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA where he taught Japanese.
Ksenia Shilikhina is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Chair of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Voronezh State University, Russia. Her main research interests include verbal humor and irony, linguistic semantics, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. She is the author of the book “Semantics and Pragmatics of Verbal Irony” (2014, in Russian) and a number of papers and chapters devoted to political humor, irony in diplomatic discourse, and verbal mechanisms of irony.
Abstract
This paper builds on a novel methodology of lexical semantics exemplified on lexical field theory by using several translations of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The present study, a large-scale collaboration, presents and compares the results for laugh, smile, grin, giggle, and other words for laughter behaviors across 14 languages and in extensive detail. The key results answer the question of what semantic dimensions the vocabularies of the various languages distinguish as marked by lexical contrasts and can inform future research in humor as well as translation studies. Based on our findings, a key marking emerges for audible (e.g., laugh) versus non-audible (e.g., smile) behaviors, as Indo-European vocabularies treat smiling as a less marked variant of laughing, e.g., German lächeln, Italian sorridere, Polish uśmiech, Turkish gülüm, but further orthogonal dimensions are documented as well, for example, aggressive, concealed, loud, or suppressed behavior. An updated hierarchy of these semantic features is proposed, and the results are presented in graphic visualizations, which also help illustrate idiosyncrasies of individual languages that go against the general trends. Exceptions to these general trends include lemmata that can cover both audible and inaudible behavior straddling what we claimed is the most important distinction (e.g., Danish grine). Finally, we outline a probabilistic method to compare word senses across languages based on aligned corpora large enough for computational approaches.
About the authors
Elisa Gironzetti is Assistant Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics at the University of Maryland (USA), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language and culture and Hispanic applied linguistics and coordinates the undergraduate Spanish language program. Her research and publications focus on Spanish as a second/heritage language, second language pedagogy, conversational humor, pragmatics, and multimodality. She recently published the book The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor (John Benjamins, 2021).
Christian F. Hempelmann is editor-in-chief of HUMOR, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at Texas A&M University–Commerce, Director of the Ontological Semantic Technology Lab, and works mainly on (the (computational) linguistics of) humor.
Adel Aldawsari is Vice Dean of the Arabic Language Institute at King AbdulAziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He received his PhD from Texas A&M University Commerce in 2019 with a dissertation on The Humor-Related Role of English Code-Switching in Arabic Scripted Monologic Acts.
Sarvenaz Balali is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Texas A&M University-Commerce specializing in applied linguistics. Sarvenaz holds a master’s degree in linguistics and a Bachelor of Arts in English translation. She has researched the linguistics of humor with a special focus on phonological correspondence in Farsi puns. She has presented her research on semantic and phonological features of Farsi puns in local as well as international conferences.
Władysław Chłopicki is Professor of Linguistics and Translation at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is past president of the ISHS, and a founding editor of the European Journal of Humour Research and Tertium Linguistic Journal. His academic interests include interdisciplinary humor research in the context of cognitive linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, narratology, and cultural studies, (most recently humor in the public sphere – humorinpublic.eu). He authored numerous articles mainly related to humor studies and a Polish-language monograph humor research. He also co-edited more than a dozen monographs on humor, inter-cultural communication, communication styles and linguistics, including Humorous Discourse (De Gruyter 2017) and Polish Humour (Tertium 2012).
Hilal Ergül is an Assistant Professor at the University of Northern Iowa where she teaches applied linguistics and TESOL courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her main research interests include second language acquisition, specifically language teachers’ error correction practices and their effectiveness for learners, and pragmatics, focusing mainly on politeness and humor.
Meichan Huang is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Syracuse University. Her research interests include second-language speech perception and production, prosody, and World Englishes. Her current research explored the role of prosodic features in intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness judgments of speakers from different language backgrounds, as well as pronunciation instruction in higher education. She is also interested in NLP projects on speech recognition and semantic fields.
Liisi Laineste is a senior researcher at the Department of Folkloristics of the Estonian Literary Museum and the Center for Excellence in Estonian Studies, where she is the head of the working group of contemporary culture and media. Her main research pertains to folk humour and its online manifestations. She has published articles and edited books and journal issues on ethnic humour, visual forms of humour (e.g., caricatures and memes), digital folklore and online communication, many of which represent an interdisciplinary angle and combine folkloristics with linguistics, psychology, sociology, and communication studies.
Dr. Shigehito Menjo graduated from A&M-Commerce with a Ph.D. in English with a specialty in Applied Linguistics in 2018. For his dissertation, he studied the acquisition of English prosody (intonation and stress) by Japanese learners of English and contributed new understanding to the field of second language development. In Fall 2018, Dr. Menjo joined the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA where he taught Japanese.
Ksenia Shilikhina is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Chair of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Voronezh State University, Russia. Her main research interests include verbal humor and irony, linguistic semantics, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. She is the author of the book “Semantics and Pragmatics of Verbal Irony” (2014, in Russian) and a number of papers and chapters devoted to political humor, irony in diplomatic discourse, and verbal mechanisms of irony.
Acknowledgments
In addition to the fully involved co-authors, Louise Lehrmann has helped with the markup of lexical items in the Danish translation of the novel and Birgitte Henriksen with the semantic features.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Full Length Articles
- Satire without borders: the age-moderated effect of one-sided versus two-sided satire on hedonic experiences and patriotism
- A leader or a comedian? Perceptions of politicians based on their use of humor on Twitter
- Age differences in using humor to cope during a pandemic
- Laughing to love science: contextualizing science comedy
- Semantic components of laughter behavior: a lexical field study of 14 translations of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Low system justification drives ideological differences in joke perception: a critical commentary and re-analysis of Baltiansky et al. (2021)
- Apples versus oranges, normative claims, and other things we did not mention: a response to Purser and Harper (2023)
- Book Reviews
- Sienkiewicz, Matt and Nick Marx: That’s not funny: how the right makes comedy work for them
- Chukwimah, Ignatius: Sexual Humour in Africa: Gender, Jokes, and Societal Change
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Full Length Articles
- Satire without borders: the age-moderated effect of one-sided versus two-sided satire on hedonic experiences and patriotism
- A leader or a comedian? Perceptions of politicians based on their use of humor on Twitter
- Age differences in using humor to cope during a pandemic
- Laughing to love science: contextualizing science comedy
- Semantic components of laughter behavior: a lexical field study of 14 translations of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Low system justification drives ideological differences in joke perception: a critical commentary and re-analysis of Baltiansky et al. (2021)
- Apples versus oranges, normative claims, and other things we did not mention: a response to Purser and Harper (2023)
- Book Reviews
- Sienkiewicz, Matt and Nick Marx: That’s not funny: how the right makes comedy work for them
- Chukwimah, Ignatius: Sexual Humour in Africa: Gender, Jokes, and Societal Change
