Divided by a common language? Jocular quips and (non-)affiliative responses in initial interactions among American and Australian speakers of English
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Michael Haugh
Michael Haugh is Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland. His research interests lie in pragmatics, conversation analysis, intercultural communication and humor studies, with a particular focus on the role of language in social interaction.
und
Lara Weinglass
Lara Weinglass is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. The working title for her PhD project is
Humour and Laughter in Australian Workplace Interactions , and she is currently collecting data for her project. She is particularly interested in conversation analysis, interactional pragmatics and humor studies.
Abstract
Studies of conversational humor in intercultural settings have focused largely on illustrating how participants can successfully draw on humor to build rapport. However, it is nevertheless clear that attempts at humor can also go awry in settings in which participants come from different cultural backgrounds. In this paper, we focus on the responses of American and Australian participants to playful or light-hearted comments on, or responses to, another speaker’s just prior serious talk, which are designed to initiate a non-serious side sequence, or what we term “jocular quips”. Drawing from a comparative analysis of thirty recordings of initial interactions involving participants from ostensibly the same (AmAm; AusAus) and different (AmAus) backgrounds, we report our finding that affiliative responses to jocular quips are more prevalent in the “intracultural” dyads (AmAm, AusAus), while non-affiliative responses are more frequent in the “intercultural” dyads (AmAus). We suggest this is due to troubles in accomplishing particularistic co-membership and shared critical, mocking attitudes that are attributed to, or directed at that category. We conclude that Americans and Australians are not “divided by a common language” as such, but rather that affiliating with jocular quips in initial interactions is contingent on the locally situated accomplishment of particular membership categories and predicates associated with these categories.
About the authors
Michael Haugh is Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland. His research interests lie in pragmatics, conversation analysis, intercultural communication and humor studies, with a particular focus on the role of language in social interaction.
Lara Weinglass is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. The working title for her PhD project is Humour and Laughter in Australian Workplace Interactions, and she is currently collecting data for her project. She is particularly interested in conversation analysis, interactional pragmatics and humor studies.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to acknowledge the support of a Discovery grant from the Australian Research Council (DP120100516) that has enabled the research reported in this paper to be undertaken.
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- 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
Artikel in diesem Heft
- 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
