Volume 7, Issue 3

What is it that makes humor difficult to understand and appreciate in a second language (L2)? Despite advances in research in both L2 pragmatics and humor studies, scholars have as yet had little to say on this topic. In interviews, learners themselves pinpoint culture, vocabulary, and the speed at which playful talk often takes place as difficulties. Yet, as we know, hypothetical self-reports of language use can be quite unreliable. Thus, this exploratory study aimed to examine L2 understanding of humor more systematically. Six advanced non-native speakers (NNSs) of English kept diaries in which they recorded their experiences with humor in English over an eight-week period. Group meetings were also held every two weeks during this time to allow the participants to elaborate on, interpret, and discuss their experiences. For the present study, all instances of failed humor were extracted and coded. These were used to construct a typology of failed humor, which identifies seven levels at which a speaker may fail to successfully engage in a humorous exchange. The data suggest that NNS failures differ from those of NSs largely from a quantitative, but not qualitative, standpoint.

Mastering the pragmatic norms of another language is a great challenge to non-native speakers. One aspect of the pragmatic norms of a language is the appropriate use of general extenders. These are items such as and stuff and or something like that , which have been ascribed a number of important textual and interactive functions in discourse. This paper explores the uses of the English extender or so by native speakers of New Zealand English and by German non-native speakers of English (GNNSE) plus the use of its German word-for-word equivalent oder so in German in a corpus of 18.5 hours of dyadic conversations between non-familiars. The quantitative and qualitative investigations reveal non-standard uses by the non-native speakers with regard to frequency and functions of use. The analysis shows that GNNSE use or so for functions other than numerical approximation, and suggests that its high frequency use is related to a preference for German oder so , which has a wider semantic scope in German.

In this paper I propose that pragmatic principles and mechanisms are at play in the recovery of ‘de se’ attitudes in English (and in Italian), in cases in which grammatical and semantic information does not exclusively determine the ‘de se’ interpretation. I claim that the pragmatic processes at work in utterances reporting ‘de se’ attitudes are cases of free enrichment. In free enrichments, although there does not seem to be either an overt indexical or a covert slot in the linguistically decoded logical form of the sentence uttered, the logical form nevertheless needs to be conceptually enriched in the explicature (Huang, Pragmatics, Oxford University Press, 2007:191). I develop my view in the relevance-theoretic framework, according to which the human cognitive system works in such a way as to tend to maximize relevance with respect to communication, the principle of relevance being responsible for both the explicit and implicit content of an utterance. However, I should acknowledge that I was also influenced by Levinson's (Presumptive meanings, MIT Press, 2000) ideas about pragmatic intrusion. I propose to add another type of intrusive construction: attitudes ‘de se’.

This summary gives an introduction to the volume “Language as dialogue. From rules to principles of probability” (Weigand, Benjamins, 2009), which traces the development of my thinking about language and languages within the last two decades. The volume assembles a series of articles, some of them unpublished before. The topics of the articles are manifold and far-reaching; they include, for instance, speech act theory, pragmatics, semantics, lexicology, language comparison, corpus linguistics and language use in institutions. Language turns out to be a concept that is intrinsically connected with other human abilities such as thinking, perceiving, and feeling. Consequently, what is necessary in theory is a change from reductionism to holism, from separating components to integrating and reconciling them in a genuinely holistic model. Such a change has been made by means of the model of the dialogic action game or the Mixed Game Model (MGM) based on principles of probability.