Laughter, as an important interactional resource, has been recognized as not simply a response to humor in many researches. It is much related to an action formation from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In this oral proficiency interviews for admission into a certain English college between native interviewer and Chinese candidates, there appear quite a number of cases in which laughter serves as the major constituent of the responding turn to the first pair part (FPP) (except for questions) in terms of adjacency pair. This study, therefore, identifies those responding actions that laughter performs, or concurrently constructs, from the perspective of Conversation Analysis, and explores the reasons why laughter is employed and the roles that laughter has achieved. Hence it contributes to the understanding of laughter as a resource of alignment or affiliation in oral proficiency interview, and consequently a vital paralinguistic constituent of L2 interactional competence.

This study inquires into Chinese working couples' (both the husband and the wife have a paid job) marital power relations manifested in their use of face-threatening utterances in family situations. A quantitative approach is adopted and the data come from 4 commonly-accepted "realistic" Chinese TV dramas committed to contemporary Chinese working couple's family life. First, we identify the strategies character couples utilize to criticize their spouse and also those they use to respond to spousal criticisms, and categorize them into different types according to their face-threatening intensity. Then the differences between husbands and wives in their use of these different types of strategies (in both making and responding to criticisms) are compared quantitatively. An analysis of these differences indicates that while no significant power differences are found in their ways to criticize their spouse, working wives demonstrate more power than working husbands in responding to the criticisms from their spouse. Overall, Chinese working wives have the same or even more marital power in conjugal relationship. This finding mirrors what has been proved in other research fields, that is, women's marital power has been generally enhanced since the foundation of New China in 1949. In addition, we also find that working husbands are more inclined to avoid the criticisms from their wife and thus the involvement into marital confrontation, which reflects and verifies traditional Chinese stereotypes and expectations on men that they should be more generous and tolerant than women.