Prosody and Humor
Implications for pragmatics
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Implications for pragmatics 4.1 Prosody as a marker The general approach to the study of the (alleged) ironical tone of voice and more or less implicitly to the prosodic and multimodal markers of humor has been that these are “markers” in the sense that they set the playful frame of humor (Bateson 1972; Dascal 1985; Dascal and Berenstein 1987: 144) thus allowing the hearer (in a broad sense) to identify the humorous intention of the speaker and therefore trigger the inferential work necessary to the processing of humor. This view is certainly correct. However, we feel that it needs to be reconsidered in the light of two issues: on the one hand, intentionality, presupposed by the idea that speakers using prosody to “mark” humor may be a matter of degree; on the other, speakers may be doing other “work” beside marking humor, when they engage in prosodic and paralinguistic “marking”. 4.2 What does it mean to say that feature X is a “marker” of Y? An issue brought about forcefully by the work of Williams et al. (2009) is the ques- tion whether the features commonly assumed to “mark” irony are in fact examples of “leakage”. The term is used by Ekman and Friesen (1969) to indicate involuntary non-conscious behavior that escapes the speaker’s control and allows an observer to reconstruct their inner state more or less against the will of the speaker. The difference from markers, which if not necessarily conscious are at least implic- itly intended by the speaker to facilitate the recognition of the humorous/ironi- cal intention, is clear and extremely significant. From a pragmatic perspective the absence of intentionality (be it consciously applied or merely implicitly so, for example because part of a tacitly known system of communicative competence) would relegate these unintentional correlates of irony/humor to the domain of ostensive communication (or natural meaning, to use Grice’s 1957 terminology). Prosody and humor 9 Finally, we should note another potential objection to the idea of “marking”: it is likely that the low pitch found in Pickering et al. (2009) to correlate with punch lines is not a marker at all (in the sense of indicating the intentionality of the speaker) but merely a physical correlate of the punch lines motivated by their position at the end of paratones. This clearly negates the idea of intentional or even conventional marking, while leaving open the possibility of correlational marking. A potential clue to intentionality of marking, in the case of smiling, is the Duchenne display, which reveals that the smiling is the sincere expression of amusement, rather than an intentional signal. However, it should be noted that detection of non-Duchenne smiles requires intensive training and is not avail- able to the general population (Ekman and Friesen 1969). Likewise, discrimina- tion between voluntary and involuntary laughter is not feasible (Ruch and Ekman 1981: 428). 4.3 Prosodic and paralinguistic markers as eliciting affect Bachorowski and associates “conceptualize antiphonal laughter as being part of an affect-induction process that promotes affiliative, cooperative behavior between social partners” (Smoski and Bachorowski 2003: 329). “Antiphonal” laughter is so named precisely to exclude the intentionality presupposed by “reciprocal” laugh- ter or the mechanical connotations of “contagious” laughter (Provine 1996b). Bachorowski and Owren (2001) found that voiced laughter elicited positive af- fect. As the results in this book show, laughter and smiling are the most common markers of humor. Bachorowski’s results invite a re-formulation of the conceptu- alization of laughter as a “marker” of irony. Specifically, if laughter elicits positive affect, then the speaker is not so much marking something, but rather showing di- rect, ostensive evidence of his/her positive affect (Owren and Bachorowski 2003), thus helping the hearer feel similar affect and thereby facilitating a playful framing (Goffman 1967), or, as Bryant argues (this book), seek to achieve synchronous behavior. To put it differently, the speaker may not be marking anything (either in the intentional sense or in the weaker sense of conventionalized unconscious behavior) but merely “leaking” information. Much like if one runs for a mile, one will be sweating and flushed without any intention to “mark” or “signal” one’s state. Needless to say, one can manipulate involuntary displays, such as panting or flushing, to signal deceptively that one is out of breath, for example. We would like to suggest, as a first approximation to clarifying this issue, to reserve the term “marker” for those behaviors that are used intentionally by the speaker to com- municate the metamessage “this is humorous/ironical/sarcastic” or that are con- ventionalized to do so. We could then use indices (as in “humorous indices”) to indicate those unintentional indicators of humor (such as spontaneous laughter, 10 Salvatore Attardo, Manuela Wagner, and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi gaze aversion, etc.,). Needless to say, a behavioral cue, such as laughter, can be ambiguous (i.e., be either a marker or an index). 4.4 Further research It is an academic cliché that new papers stimulate further research, but in the case of this collection of papers, this is literally true. Cheang and Pell (this book) begs for the replication of its results using masking techniques; Attardo et al. (this book) is a preliminary study of virtually untouched areas. Flamson et al. (this book) and Cheang and Pell (this book), likewise point to the need of further study in other languages, to investigate how irony, sarcasm, and humor are marked is those lan- guages. Wennerstrom’s paper moreover opens an entirely new line of research — jokes in which the punch line hinges on prosody. tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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