A cross-linguistic comparison of the propositional content of laughter in American English and Central Thai

IF 1.8 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS Intercultural Pragmatics Pub Date : 2022-03-30 DOI:10.1515/ip-2022-2004

Elizabeth Hanks

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract Research suggests that laughter can serve several communicative functions beyond indicating mirth, and as such, may hold propositional meaning. The present study analyzes cross-linguistic differences in the propositional content of laughter in American English and Central Thai television shows. A framework for classifying laughter by propositional content was first developed by drawing on existing literature and bottom-up analysis of the laughter found in American English and Thai shows. The framework includes categories of positive valency, negative valency, and humor, along with subcategories of disbelief, support, expressive, and pride. A multi-modal corpus of laughter was then created by compiling all laughter instances in the first 100 min of three American English television shows and three Thai television shows. The meanings of all 848 laughter instances in the corpus were categorized by propositional content of laughter. Results show that humor laughter and negative-support laughter are more frequent in American English, and positive-support laughter and negative-pride laughter are more frequent in Central Thai. These findings provide further evidence that laughter contains propositional content because they indicate that laughter use is subject to cross-linguistic variation that aligns with existing linguistic patterns and cultural values.

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美式英语和中泰语笑命题内容的跨语言比较

摘要研究表明，除了表示欢笑之外，笑还可以发挥多种交际功能，因此，笑可能具有命题意义。本研究分析了美国英语和泰国中部电视节目中笑命题内容的跨语言差异。根据现有文献和对美国英语和泰语节目中笑的自下而上的分析，首次提出了一个按命题内容对笑进行分类的框架。该框架包括积极价、消极价和幽默的类别，以及怀疑、支持、表达和自豪的子类别。然后，通过汇编三个美国英语电视节目和三个泰国电视节目的前100分钟的所有笑声实例，创建了一个多模态笑声语料库。根据笑的命题内容对语料库中848个笑实例的意义进行了分类。结果表明，幽默笑和消极支持笑在美式英语中更为常见，而积极支持笑和消极自豪笑在泰语中部更为常见。这些发现为笑包含命题内容提供了进一步的证据，因为它们表明笑的使用受到与现有语言模式和文化价值观一致的跨语言变异的影响。

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来源期刊

Intercultural Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.10

自引率

36.40%

发文量

期刊介绍： Intercultural Pragmatics is a fully peer-reviewed forum for theoretical and applied pragmatics research. The goal of the journal is to promote the development and understanding of pragmatic theory and intercultural competence by publishing research that focuses on general theoretical issues, more than one language and culture, or varieties of one language. Intercultural Pragmatics encourages ‘interculturality’ both within the discipline and in pragmatic research. It supports interaction and scholarly debate between researchers representing different subfields of pragmatics including the linguistic, cognitive, social, and interlanguage paradigms. The intercultural perspective is relevant not only to each line of research within pragmatics but also extends to several other disciplines such as anthropology, theoretical and applied linguistics, psychology, communication, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and bi- and multilingualism. Intercultural Pragmatics makes a special effort to cross disciplinary boundaries. What we primarily look for is innovative approaches and ideas that do not always fit into existing paradigms, and lead to new ways of thinking about language. Intercultural Pragmatics has always encouraged the publication of theoretical papers including linguistic and philosophical pragmatics that are very important for research in intercultural pragmatics.