Prosody and Humor
Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Wagner, and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi 3
tải về 1.21 Mb. Chế độ xem pdf
|
21-tran thanh ai
| 6
Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Wagner, and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi 3. The chapters in this book The chapters in this book investigate the role of prosody and humor in a variety of settings: Languages studied include English, Cantonese, French, and Portuguese. The data of investigation range from reactions to recorded data, elicited humor in a laboratory setting, and recordings of spontaneous humor in business meetings in rural Brazil and in dialogues in France. In addition, authors point to the neces- sity of considerations in methodology, such as the type and quality of the data studied, the context of the specific situation, as well as the approach applied when studying prosody of humor. In the chapter “Recognizing sarcasm without language: A cross-linguistic study of English and Cantonese”, Henry Cheang and Marc Pell investigate if pros- ody alone can determine recognition of certain speaker intentions in the native language and in an unfamiliar language. The authors exposed 20 native speakers of English and 20 native speakers of Cantonese to recorded utterances in which native speakers of English and native speakers of Cantonese enacted sarcasm, sin- cerity, humorous irony, and neutrality. The subjects were then asked to judge the speaker attitude of the native language stimuli as well as the stimuli in the unfa- miliar language. While native speakers of a language were found to be sensitive to sarcasm in their native language they only identified sarcasm in the unfamiliar language at approximately chance level. The higher level of recognition of other attitudes in the unfamiliar language points to the possibility that sarcasm is pro- cessed in a distinct manner. Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering, and Amanda Baker investigate the pros- ody and multimodality of humor in conversation in the chapter “Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation”. The main research question the study addresses is, “Is conversational humor prosodically different from narra- tive, canned humor?” Their findings revealed no significant differences in speech rate, volume, and pauses between conversational humor and narrative humor or between the serious text and the instances of humor. The authors also conclude that multimodal analysis of conversational humor is crucial in order to interpret the data properly. In “Prosody in spontaneous humor: Evidence for encryption” Thomas Flamson, Gregory Bryant, and Clark Barrett compare prosody in spontaneous hu- morous and non-humorous speech collected during monthly business meetings conducted in Portuguese in a rural Brazilian collective farm setting. Results con- firm the authors’ hypothesis based on the encryption theory of humor (Flamson and Barrett 2008) that speakers would not mark humor explicitly in spontaneous conversation but rather encrypt the information so that the audience is required to draw from background knowledge to show uptake. One possible explanation Prosody and humor 7 for the lack of marking the authors provide is that by not marking humor and therefore relying on the common background knowledge, the speaker emphasizes his ties with the audience. While most of the research on humor and prosody has focused on the punch line, in the chapter “Formulaic jokes in interaction: The prosody of riddle open- ings” Christy Bird analyzes the prosody of the initial wh-questions in riddles, and specifically in riddles versus conversations. Bird finds a significant difference in pitch characteristics between conversational wh-questions and wh-questions in riddles. Further analyses revealed that riddles were delivered with limited pitch variation across the utterance and at the syllable level. The author argues that the finding can be explained through discourse context, in particular by the fact that riddle questions do not require contextualization. In “Verbal irony in the wild”, Gregory Bryant proposes the need to use a form- function approach to the study of prosody. His analysis of spontaneous conver- sations reveals an enormous variation of speaking styles communicating ironic meanings. The chapter focuses on figures of speech such as prosodic contrast in pitch and volume and in laughter, in particular the so-called antiphonal laughter on the basis that their prosodic features are determined by their communicative functions. In his conclusions, Bryant proposes several lines of research to further prosodic research and humor. Ann Wennestrom’s “Rich Pitch: The humorous effects of deaccent and L+H* pitch accent” focuses on how two intonation patterns: the intonation of contrast, or L+H* pitch accent, and the intonation of given information, or “deaccent” con- tribute to the punch lines in jokes and their humorous effect. She analyzes six cases of so-called intonation jokes with punch lines that show both intonation patterns. The contrast between lexical and syntactical structure and the intonation creates an incongruity that triggers a mental search in the hearer’s mind for discourse cohesion. She discusses this joke type and its contribution to humor within the framework of theme/rheme contrast, the processing cost, the ad hoc categories, sa- lience, and a particular model of mental representation, blends. The author dem- onstrates how the study of intonation jokes extends the study of the field of humor to that of cognitive processes. Roxane Bertrand and Béatrice Priego-Valverde’s chapter poses the question “Does prosody play a specific role in conversational humor?” The authors use a corpus of annotated transcriptions of eight hours of audio-video recorded dia- logues in French. Their purpose is to study humor and prosody in the framework of Conversation Analysis. Two discursive devices in which humor appears are described: reported speech and repetition. The first device, prosodic cues, was used to animate different characters and in particular to portray a character. The second, prosodic orientation through diverse prosodic resources, was used to 8 Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Wagner, and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi successfully construct humorous sequences. According to the authors, humor is created through an integration of a diversity of cues. Urios-Aparisi and Wagner investigate the role of prosody, in particular pitch and pause, in conversational acted humor. The close analysis of instances of humor in the HBO series Sex and the City (SATC) shows how pitch and pauses are part of the prosodic bundle that can work at several levels in interaction with each other: potentially marking humor, turn changes or topic changes. The study confirms a lack of a clear connection of certain prosodic features that “mark” humor. tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
|