Prosody and Humor
Table 5. Comparison between humorous turns and their preceding turns. Pitch (measured in Hz)
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| Table 5. Comparison between humorous turns and their preceding turns.
Pitch (measured in Hz) Volume (measured in dB) Preceding turn Humor Preceding turn Humor 224 162 73 72 200 216 69 74 216 204 74 74 232 204 64 67 172 179 68 72 218 227 59 62 147 227 65 60 218 256 71 58 162 185 67 63 Total average Total average Total average Total average 199 207 68 67 Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation 49 4.2 Volume The present study is consistent with the result in Pickering et al. (2009): humor- ous turns are produced on average 0.99 dB higher than serious turns (0.2 dB in Pickering et al. 2009). This difference, as it was in Pickering et al. (2009), is insig- nificant. We conclude that canned jokes and conversational jokes do not differ in terms of volume marking of the humor. Like for pitch, we checked if humor may differ in volume from the preceding turn, but we found no significant difference in volume, with the humor being one decibel softer than the preceding turn, on average (Table 5, Decibel measures). 4.3 Speech rate As we saw, the present study found no significant difference in the speech rate of humorous and serious turns. This is at variance with the results of Pickering et al. (2009) where we have found that punch lines were delivered at a significantly slower rate than the surrounding text. We return to this datum below. 5. Comparison of conversational humor vs. canned humor An issue of importance in the pragmatics of humor has been the differences be- tween conversational/discursive humor and narrative/canned humor. In this con- text, we are interested in the prosodic differences between the two, if any. 5.1 Speech rate We noted above that the results of the present study failed to duplicate the signifi- cantly lower speech rate of punch lines, found in Pickering et al. (2009). We found instead no significant difference between serious and humorous turns’ speech rate. However, we note that the narrative punch lines were delivered at the slowest speech rate of all the humorous events (0.165 on average; see Table 2). Conversely, irony and serious turns are essentially delivered at the same speech rate (0.265 and 0.27, respectively, see Table 2). Hence, we hypothesize that there may be a correla- tion between narrative punch lines and lower speech rate, absent in irony and jab lines. This may be then a difference between narrative and non-narrative humor delivery. |