Prosody and Humor
Prosodic and multimodal markers
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| Prosodic and multimodal markers
of humor in conversation* Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker Texas A&M University - Commerce / Georgia State University This case study extends the findings of Pickering et al. 2009 to the domain of conversational humor. We find that, as was the case in humorous narratives, conversational humor is not marked by higher pitch or volume, increased speech rate, or significant pauses. Unlike narrative humor, conversational humor is not produced at a lower pitch and slower rate than non-humorous parts of the text. We find that smiling and laughter tend to occur with humor. 1. Introduction In previous publications, Pickering et al. (2009) and Attardo and Pickering (2011), we have examined the suprasegmental prosody of joke telling. The results of the analyses of these short humorous narratives were unexpected, as they were found to contradict the “folk theory” of joke telling (for more details on the folk theory of humor performance and references, see Attardo and Pickering 2011). In a nut- shell, the folk expectation was that the punch line of a joke, being the most sig- nificant part of a narrative, would be “marked” prosodically. In contrast, however, we found that, since punch lines occur at the end of a narrative, the placement of the punch line at the end of a prosodic unit “trumped” the functional markedness; thus, punch lines were not marked with unusually high pitch or volume. Other markers also did not allow the establishment of reliable correspondences between markers and humor (see below for more details). While we consider these results very interesting, as they are among the first empirical studies of the prosody of humor, they are limited to narrative humor. In this paper, we expand the scope of our analyses to encompass discursive humor * We would like to thank two anonymous referees for their useful and insightful comments, and Manuela Wagner and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi for arranging the refereeing. We would also like to thank Phillip Hamrick for assistance in the data collection. 38 Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker (broadly defined to include irony). Speakers can produce two types of humorous turns in conversation: they can deliver a canned joke (a short narrative ending in a punch line 1 ) usually by monopolizing the floor for the duration of the narrative, 2 or they can produce a conversational witticism. The difference between the two forms is distinct: a joke is a narrative largely, but not entirely, separate from the rest of the conversation, which contains a punch line, usually at the end of the text. The punch line builds on and exploits the narrative (usually called the “set up” of the joke). Conversely, the conversational witticism is not part of a separate narrative, but rather a comical “one-liner”. Therefore the humorous line of the conversational witticism cannot build on a narrative and must either build on a previous turn by another speaker, or be interjected without prior preparation. 3 Typically, narra- tive canned jokes are introduced by negotiating sequences (such as “do you know this joke?”) whereas conversational humor is typically not. To avoid confusion, we refer to the humorous part of a joke text as “punch line” and to a conversational witticism as “jab line” (more on this term below). We also avoid using “joke” for a non-narrative humorous text, although this is a common usage. On the differenc- es between canned and conversational humor, see Attardo (1994: Ch. 10). Irony tends to be conversational humor, as it is rarely canned. Table 1 summarizes the differences between jokes and conversational humor: tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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