{"title":"Humor in intercultural interaction: A source for misunderstanding or a common ground builder? A multimodal analysis","authors":"A. Ladilova, U. Schröder","doi":"10.1515/ip-2022-0003","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present paper explores three situations of conversational humor in which not only gesture and prosody but also code-switching play a role in the process of co-construction of humor among participants in an intercultural interaction. Despite the long tradition of studying humor in interaction, there has been little research so far which includes gesture – especially manual gesture – from an embodiment perspective and concurrently draws attention to the intercultural impact of humor, including moments of code-switching. By looking at multi-party interactions between German and Brazilian speakers from a multimodal perspective, we will show how different semiotic resources such as gaze, posture, head and hand gesture, as well as prosody and code-switching are displayed in order to construct humor. Our aim is to reveal the interplay and complexity of the communicative resources in the co-construction of humor by presenting three examples with different degrees of successful humor: While the conversational humor is only understood by the German co-participants in the first example, in the second example, the humor is co-constructed successfully by the German and Brazilian participants. Yet the last example reveals that the humor is understood by everybody but taken up differently what could also be related to the institutional context in which the sequence is embedded.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":"19 1","pages":"71 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"11","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Intercultural Pragmatics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2022-0003","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 11
Abstract
Abstract The present paper explores three situations of conversational humor in which not only gesture and prosody but also code-switching play a role in the process of co-construction of humor among participants in an intercultural interaction. Despite the long tradition of studying humor in interaction, there has been little research so far which includes gesture – especially manual gesture – from an embodiment perspective and concurrently draws attention to the intercultural impact of humor, including moments of code-switching. By looking at multi-party interactions between German and Brazilian speakers from a multimodal perspective, we will show how different semiotic resources such as gaze, posture, head and hand gesture, as well as prosody and code-switching are displayed in order to construct humor. Our aim is to reveal the interplay and complexity of the communicative resources in the co-construction of humor by presenting three examples with different degrees of successful humor: While the conversational humor is only understood by the German co-participants in the first example, in the second example, the humor is co-constructed successfully by the German and Brazilian participants. Yet the last example reveals that the humor is understood by everybody but taken up differently what could also be related to the institutional context in which the sequence is embedded.
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.