“Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor
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Cliff Goddard
Cliff Goddard is Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Australia. He is a proponent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to semantics and its sister theory, the ethnopragmatic approach to pragmatics. His major publications include the textbook
Semantic Analysis (2nd ed., 2011 OUP),Words and Meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures (co-authored with Anna Wierzbicka; 2014, OUP) andTen Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words . (2018, Brill).
Abstract
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, it is argued, 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 humor. 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, which depends on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words.
Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humor based on cross-translatable terminology.
About the author
Cliff Goddard is Professor of Linguistics at Griffith University, Australia. He is a proponent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to semantics and its sister theory, the ethnopragmatic approach to pragmatics. His major publications include the textbook Semantic Analysis (2nd ed., 2011 OUP), Words and Meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages and cultures (co-authored with Anna Wierzbicka; 2014, OUP) and Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring language, thought and culture using simple, translatable words. (2018, Brill).
Acknowledgements
The explications were developed in collaboration with Anna Wierzbicka, who contributed many other insightful comments. I would also like to thank Michael Haugh and Lara Weinglass for discussion of various points, Tine Junker for assistance with German, and Bert Peeters and Kerry Mullan for assistance with French. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Workshop “Conversational humor in French and other languages: a comparative approach”, October 19, 2015, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, France. Two reviewers for Intercultural Pragmatics provided valuable comments.
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Appendix 1: Table of semantic primes (English exponents), updated from Goddard and Wierzbicka (2014)
| i, you, someone, something~thing, people, body | substantives |
| kinds, parts~have parts | relational substantives |
| this, the same, other~else | determiners |
| one, two, some, all, much~many, little~few | quantifiers |
| good, bad | evaluators |
| big, small | descriptors |
| know, think, want, don’t want, feel, see, hear | mental predicates |
| say, words, true | speech |
| do, happen, move | actions, events, movement |
| be (somewhere), there is, be (someone/something) | location, existence, specification |
| (is) mine | possession |
| live~living, die | life and death |
| time~when, now, before, after, a long time, a short time, for some time, moment | time |
| place~where, here, above, below, far, near, side, inside, touch | place |
| not, maybe, can, because, if | logical concepts |
| very, more | intensifier, augmentor |
| like~as~way | similarity |
Notes: • Exponents of primes can be polysemous, i.e., they can have other, additional meanings. • Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes. • They can be formally complex. • They can have combinatorial variants or ‘allolexes’ (indicated with ~). • Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.
Appendix 2: Semantics of laugh
Cross-linguistic semantic research indicates that ‘laugh’ is likely to have close lexical equivalents in all or most languages (Wierzbicka 2014b; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2016). This is not to deny that linguacultures vary in their attitudes towards laughing, how it is regulated, deployed, etc. (cf. Wierzbicka 1999: 217ff). The explication below is specifically for “imperfective/durative” uses of laugh. Slightly different, but closely-related, explications are needed for “perfective/punctual” uses like He laughed nervously, and for expressions like laugh at (someone). See Goddard (2017) for detailed discussion.
| Mary is laughing. |
| a. this someone (i.e. Mary) is doing something for some time (at this time) something is happening to some parts of her body because of it b. people often do this when they feel something good for a short time because they think like this: “something is happening here now things like this don’t happen very often people here can feel something good because of it” c. when someone does it, it is like this: – some parts of this someone’s mouth [m] move for some time – other people in the place where this someone is can see it – at the same time these people can hear something because of it like people can hear something when someone says something |
The word ‘often’ at the beginning of section (b) implies not always, i.e. a prototypical situation. Briefly, the components in (b) firstly imply a construal by a prototypical experiencer of an “unusual happening”: ‘something is happening here now, things like this don’t happen very often’. The following component (‘people here can feel something good because of it’) implies recognition that the event is construed as “pro-social” in a broad sense. Section (c) gives a physical description. It includes visible movement of the mouth and, typically, an audible “vocal” sound. In some languages, the components about audibility vary slightly, as in the case of Chinese xiao ‘laugh/smile’ (cf. Ye 2006).
Appendix 3: Some key English-specific “humor” words (from Goddard 2017)
| John said something funny at school yesterday. |
| John said something in this place (school) at that time (yesterday) people don’t say things like this very often when people in this place heard it, these people wanted to laugh [m] because of it at the same time they felt something good because of it |
| Mary said/did something amusing yesterday. |
| this someone (i.e. Mary) said/did something at that time (yesterday) a. when someone thinks about this, this someone can think about it like this: b. “people don’t say/do things like this very often c. someone can feel something good because of it like people often feel when they want to laugh [m]” |
| humor (a partial explication) |
| it can be like this: a. someone says something to some people b. when this someone says it, he/she thinks like this: “if I say this, these people can feel something good because of it like people often feel when they want to laugh [m] I want this” c. because this someone says this, these people can feel something good as this someone wanted d. this is good |
Note that a separate explication is needed for the phrase sense of humor, partly on account of the highly English-specific semantics of the word sense (Wierzbicka 2010: 184–192).
Appendix 4: Some components to help reduce problematical terminology and ease cross-linguistic comparison
This is a selection of key components, written in Minimal English (Goddard ed. 2018), related to some commonly used terminology in humor studies. Most of them have been extracted from published NSM studies.
abuse, mockery:
saying something bad, or very bad, about someone else
trickery, deception:
saying something about something when one knows that it is not true
cleverness, wittiness:
when people hear it, they can think: this someone can think very well, this someone can think very quickly
when people hear it, they can think: this someone can speak very well, people can’t speak like this if they can’t think very quickly
sarcasm:
saying something like (as if) one thinks something good about something when one doesn’t think like this, one thinks something bad about it
saying something like (as if) one feels something good towards someone when one doesn’t feel like this, one feels something bad towards this someone
fantasy, absurdity, obscurity:
saying about something “it is like this: ….”, when people can know that it can’t be like this
saying about something “it is like this: ….”, when everyone knows that it can’t be like this, they can’t not know it
imitative, performance-based manners of speaking:
saying something like someone else often says something like this
saying something so that when people hear it, they can think: this is not this person’s voice, it is someone else’s voice
word play: puns, ambiguity, double entendre
when people hear these words, they can think: I know what this someone wants to say with these words; at the same time, they can think: people can say something else with these words
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Conversational humor: Forms, functions and practices across cultures
- Conversational humor in French and Australian English: What makes an utterance (un)funny?
- “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor
- Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor
- Divided by a common language? Jocular quips and (non-)affiliative responses in initial interactions among American and Australian speakers of English
- Is smiling during humor so obvious? A cross-cultural comparison of smiling behavior in humorous sequences in American English and French interactions
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Conversational humor: Forms, functions and practices across cultures
- Conversational humor in French and Australian English: What makes an utterance (un)funny?
- “Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor
- Dark, but Danish: Ethnopragmatic perspectives on black humor
- Divided by a common language? Jocular quips and (non-)affiliative responses in initial interactions among American and Australian speakers of English
- Is smiling during humor so obvious? A cross-cultural comparison of smiling behavior in humorous sequences in American English and French interactions
