Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humour studies)

Goddard, Cliff; Mullan, Kerry

doi:10.1515/humor-2017-0114

Cited by 31 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Studying conversational humour across languages presents new challenges, however, including questions around the scientific language we use to identify and describe conversational humour (Béal & Mullan 2013). While studies of humour styles across cultures have been undertaken (Ku et al 2016), one potential problem with such studies is that the terms used in different languages to identify and describe instances of conversational humour do not straightforwardly correlate with each other (Goddard 2018;Goddard & Mullan 2020). A second problem is that analysts use terms in ways that sometimes diverge from their ordinary senses to refer to different or overlapping phenomena (Sinkeviciute & Dynel 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of the challenges faced by researchers working on conversational humour across languages that has perhaps hindered such cross-linguistic studies is that the particular scientific metalanguage we use to talk about the phenomenon in question influences and shapes our understanding of it (Haugh 2016). 2 As this metalanguage is invariably bound to one particular language, frequently English, this makes it difficult to know whether we are indeed talking about the same thing when analysing forms of conversational humour across languages and cultures (Béal & Mullan 2013;Goddard 2018;Goddard & Mullan 2020;Mullan & Béal 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The metapragmatics of “teasing” in Taiwanese Chinese conversational humour

Chang

Haugh

2020

EJHR

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One of the challenges faced by researchers working on conversational humour across languages is that the particular scientific metalanguage we use to talk about the phenomenon in question influences and shapes our understanding of it. The aim of this paper is to explore the import of such issues for research on conversational humour through an examination of the labels used by Taiwanese speakers of Mandarin Chinese when talking about what is broadly termed “teasing” in English. Our aim is to better understand the connotations of these various native terms, how they relate to each other, and how they are deployed by speakers when referring to “teasing” events. The study draws on interviews with native Taiwanese informants and an analysis of large web-based corpus of Mandarin Chinese, the zhTenTen17 Traditional Corpus, to show that “teasing” is conceptualised in complex ways by Taiwanese speakers of Chinese, and because of that the same “teasing” event is open to construal in different ways by those speakers. We conclude that metapragmatic studies of conversational humour in different languages are important if we are to avoid bleaching out important cultural properties and thereby distorting our objects of analysis.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The metapragmatics of “teasing” in Taiwanese Chinese conversational humour

Chang

Haugh

2020

EJHR

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“…The results reported so far contribute to an on-going project of de-naturalizing Anglo English speech practices, not only in relation to "humor" (Goddard , 2009(Goddard , 2017Goddard and Cramer 2017;Goddard and Mullan In press), but in relation to forms of address, directives, emotional expression, epistemic attitudes, arguing and advice-giving, interactional routines, and many other areas (cf. e.g.…”

Section: Implications For Anglo Ethnopragmaticsmentioning

confidence: 67%

“Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor

Goddard

2018

Intercultural Pragmatics

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Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives, such as jocular and mock, are also much-used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like. Against this background, the present paper has three main aims. In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved, it is argued, by attributing technical meanings to the terms. Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing, on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humor. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which depends on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words. Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humor based on cross-translatable terminology.

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“…'like people often do when …'). For a fuller account, see Goddard (2018a), Goddard & Mullan (2020), and Arab (2020).…”

Section: Words For "Laughing With Other People" Differ Greatly Acrossmentioning

confidence: 99%

De-Anglicising humour studies

Goddard

2020

EJHR

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This Commentary has two main aims. The first is to argue that systematic approaches to “humour” have been hampered and skewed by terminological Anglocentrism, i.e. by reliance on terms and categories which are English-specific, such as ‘amusing’, ‘joking’, ‘serious’, and ‘mock’, and even by the banner term ‘humour’ itself. Though some humour scholars have recognised this problem, I contend that they have under-estimated its severity. Anglocentric terminology not only interferes with effective communication within the field: it affects our research agendas, methodologies and theoretical framings. Needless to say, humour studies is not alone in facing this predicament, which at its largest can be described as the global Anglicisation of humanities and social science discourse.While calls to make humour studies more conceptually pluralistic are laudable, they cannot fully succeed while ‘full’ Anglo English remains the dominant scholarly lingua franca. The second aim of this paper is to argue that considerable progress can be made by “de-Anglicising English” from within, using a newly developed approach known as Minimal English. This allows re-thinking and re-framing humour terminology and agendas using a small vocabulary of simple cross-translatable English words, i.e. words which carry with them a minimum of Anglo conceptual baggage. For illustrative purposes, I will discuss how complex terms such as ‘wit, wittiness’ and ‘fantasy/absurd humour’ can be clarified and de-Anglicised using Minimal English.

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Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humour studies)

Cited by 31 publications

References 24 publications

The metapragmatics of “teasing” in Taiwanese Chinese conversational humour

The metapragmatics of “teasing” in Taiwanese Chinese conversational humour

“Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor

De-Anglicising humour studies

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