Abstract
This paper investigates how participants use laughter to create and reinforce food attitudes in conversations over a Dairy Taster Brunch. Previous conversation analytic research on Japanese conversations about food has focused on food assessments, identification, and categorization. This research addresses the following questions: 1) How does food trigger humor and laughter in conversations over food? 2) What about the situation elicits laughter? 3) How is humor and laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in the conversational interaction? and 4) What kinds of food attitudes are created using humor and laughter in talk about food? Results show that food attitudes are not lodged in the individual but rather are created and reinforced moment-by-moment in temporally unfolding multimodal conversational interaction. This research contributes to the growing body of research on language and food, sheds light on the relation between laughter and food, and has implications for healthy eating, and cross-cultural communication.
Acknowledgments
Portions of this paper were presented at the 16th International Pragmatics Conference (2019) and the 11th International Conference on Practical Linguistics of Japanese (ICPLJ11) (2020). I would like to thank Professor Emeritus Dr. Midori Takasaki, Professor Emeritus Midori Kasai, and Associate Professors Kumiko Ishii (Ochanomizu University) and Nami Fukutome (Tokyo Seiei University), and Yoko Ishihara (Sozokai Medical Corporation International Department, AJS International Academy) for their assistance and comments. I am also grateful to Ami Hirata, Kurumi Ikeda, Arisa Minami, Yuki Miura, Yufuko Saeda, and Hanae Takaoka for their assistance transcribing and interpreting the data, and collecting the data with several other assistants, and am thankful to the Dairy Taster Brunch participants, whose names will remain anonymous. I would also like to thank editor Masahiko Minami and the two reviewers who reviewed this paper for their helpful corrections and comments.
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Research funding: This research has been supported by a University of Minnesota Imagine Fund Annual Award for “Why is eating pleasurable?” and a University of Minnesota Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship (“Dynamic construction of eating norms while eating and talking about food over a meal”) 2017–2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100007249.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Notes
- Editors’ notes
- Articles
- How is laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in Japanese Dairy Taster Brunch conversations
- Hard-to-learn conjunctive expressions for advanced learners: a survey on storytelling in I-JAS
- Japanese L2 learners’ subjective construal: an analysis of expressions of emotion and evaluation in written storytelling found in I-JAS data
- Filler words in Japanese textbooks and Japanese classes
- How an utterance is regarded as implying disagreement: an analysis of confirmation requests in Japanese decision-making meetings
- Reexamining Japanese youth language
- Book Reviews
- Yuta Sakamoto: Silently Structured Silent Argument
- Ken-Ichi Kadooka: Japanese Mood and Modality in Systemic Functional Linguistics: Theory and Application
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Notes
- Editors’ notes
- Articles
- How is laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in Japanese Dairy Taster Brunch conversations
- Hard-to-learn conjunctive expressions for advanced learners: a survey on storytelling in I-JAS
- Japanese L2 learners’ subjective construal: an analysis of expressions of emotion and evaluation in written storytelling found in I-JAS data
- Filler words in Japanese textbooks and Japanese classes
- How an utterance is regarded as implying disagreement: an analysis of confirmation requests in Japanese decision-making meetings
- Reexamining Japanese youth language
- Book Reviews
- Yuta Sakamoto: Silently Structured Silent Argument
- Ken-Ichi Kadooka: Japanese Mood and Modality in Systemic Functional Linguistics: Theory and Application