This study is based on interaction in institutional settings (job interviews, posttrial interviews with defendants, negotiations between high-school students, telephone conversations between social-welfare officers and parents) and examines the social significance of laughter in dialogue. As an example, two assumptions put forward by Jefferson (1979Jefferson ( , 1984 are questioned-namely, that laughter is regularly triggered by something funny and that laughter always has a strong inviting character. The analyses show that, in dialogue, we often laugh alone and not always at things considered particularly funny. Mutual laughter is a sign of rapport and consensus. This is exemplified by the fact that in the job interviews resulting in a job offer there was more mutual laughter than in those involving applicants who were unsuccessful. Unilateral laughter is used to modify verbal expressions or attitudes and can help us in handling ambiguities and tension.

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This article presents an analysis ofthe distribution and f unction of laughter in three different types of authentic international negotiations, in which both native and non-native Speakers of English took pari. All t he instances in t he corpus where one, some, or all of the participants could be heard to laugh or pronounce a phrase laughingly were identified. The analyses focussed on when the participants laughed, what the participants laughed at and how the participants laughed -jointly or unilaterally. The analyses indicatefirst that laughter works äs a discourse boundary device; second, that laughter Signals what topics are important or less important, sensitive or less sensitive. Third, earlier findings that unilateral laughter, äs opposed to joint laughter, is more frequent with participants who are at a disadvantage were conßrmed.Handbooks and populär articles on negotiating skills often emphasize the importance of humor and laughter Among others, Henry Kissinger is said to have reached many of bis negotiation goals through a clever use of humor and timely based laughter. Humor has been seen äs a channel for introducing new ideas onto the agenda, for provoking change, for delivering criticism, and for getting out of tight spots. Research on the function of humor and laughter in negotiation processes is extremely scarce. This paper is aimed at redressing this imbalance, presenting an analysis ofthe function of laughter and -to a certain degree -humor in authentic negotiations.

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This paper deals with the interaction between legal Professionals and defendants in criminal court trials, The data corpus consists of40 trials recorded in aSwedish district court, all featuring minor economic offences. Analyses focus particularly upon the ways in which the discourse space is shared. The interplay between the various types ofdirecting and controlling moves adopted by fudges and lawyers, and defendants' attempts to voice their points ofview is accounted for. The quantitative pari of the study makes use ofa coding system in which actors f contributions to the dialogue are characterized in terms of different types of initiatives and responses. Furthermore, the differential effects of specific questioning styles are investigated. Trials are shown to vary in several dimensions of interactional asymmetry. It appears that defendants who have committed relatively more vs less serious offences are treated in significantly different ways; relatively more interrogation-like vs more conversation-like ways of condttcting the courtroom hearings are identified.