Teasing in informal contexts in English as an Asian lingua franca

Abstract

This paper explores how speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF) manage the interactional back-and-forth of teasing, a social action which, being fundamentally ambiguous, is open to interpretation by a target and/or other participants as aggressive in intent. The data reported here draw on the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), and describe some of the more typical teasing practices which occur among Asian ELF speakers in informal, non-task-focused contexts. More specifically, this research explores the interpersonal functions which teasing performs in ACE interactions; the teasing strategies commonly employed to serve these functions; and the responses of recipients to teases targeting them. The data show that teasing is a common practice in interaction among Asian ELF speakers, and is accomplished through a variety of strategies such as jocular mockery, jocular agreement with a target’s negative self-assessment, jocular insult, and banter. Significantly, teasing in ACE appears to be essentially jocular rather than conveying veiled aggression; markers such as laughter, heightened vocal pitch and lexical exaggeration are commonly employed to signpost the non-serious nature of such utterances. Teases are also commonly received as jocular by recipients; there are no instances of offense being expressed by a tease recipient.

role of ‘familiarity’ in Mandarin Chinese speakers’ metapragmatic evaluations of Australian conversational humour

“…While some studies show evidence of various degrees of difficulty in producing or comprehending humour by language learners as well as different levels of engagement in humour sequences (Davies 2003;Bell 2005), jocular conversations in intercultural settings should be seen as jointly constructed interactional practices (Cheng 2003;Matsumoto 2014). For instance, humour in English as a lingua franca in Asia in the form of teasing, banter or jocular mockery has been found to be frequently used in informal conversations and those attempts at humour tend to be constructed and perceived as jocular (Walkinshaw 2016; see also Matsumoto 2014;Moalla 2015). While studies of casual interactions are very few, institutional interactions have received more attention.…”

‘We Want Fork but No Pork’: (Im)Politeness in Humour by Asian Users of English as a Lingua Franca and Australian English Speakers

“…Habib's (2008) study of humour and disagreement among female ELF users in the US found that humour (particularly jocular teasing) and disagreement were used to maintain and display interactional rapport among interactants (cf. Walkinshaw, 2016;Walkinshaw and Kirkpatrick, 2014). Rogerson-Revell (2007) and Moody (2014) 10.1163/26660393-bja10010 | Contrastive PragmaticS (2020) 1-29 highlight a similar function in business contexts in South East Asia and Japan respectively.…”