Prosody and Humor
Table 2. Episode 1 Final interaction between Carrie and Big Text with pauses
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| Table 2. Episode 1 Final interaction between Carrie and Big
Text with pauses Global F0 1 Big: So, what have you been doing lately? 127.77 2 Carrie: You mean, besides going out every night 209.75 3 Big: Yeah, I mean what do you do for work? 126.70 4 Carrie: Well, this is my work, 241.84 5 I’m sort of a sexual anthropologist 196.75 6 Big: You mean like a (0.59) hooker?(They both smile) 111.20 7 Carrie: No, I write a column called Sex and the City. Right now, I’m researching an article about women who have sex like men 189.66 8 (Big looks confused) You know, they have sex and then after- wards they feel nothing 193.06 9 Big: But you’re not like that 108.85 10 Carrie: Well, aren’t you? 205.64 11 Big: Not a drop, not even half a drop 101.4 12 Carrie: Wow, what’s wrong with you? 208.63 13 Big: I get it, 104.81 14 you’ve never been in love 98.35 15 Carrie: Oh yeah? 191.01 16 Big: Yeah 97.12 17 Carrie: Thanks for the ride 173.13 18 Big: Anytime 117.86 19 Carrie: Wait (The window opens) Have you ever been in love? 154.86 20 Big: Absolfuckinglutely! (spoken slowly) 85.75 Prosody of humor in Sex and the City 179 the contrast between the uncomfortable moment to tell Patience the encounter with her husband and the ironic remark “PS: congratulations”. Trying to make light of a potentially face-threatening situation, Carrie uses humor in reference to Peter’s manhood. The changes of pitch are prefaced by pauses, which stress the uneasiness of the speaker grasping for words while marking the comments as funny utterances. Later on, in an interaction between the four main characters in a restaurant, Samantha uses irony by comparing Peter’s showing off his penis in front of Carrie with behaviors monkeys display. She marks the word “monkey” with higher pitch (387.8 Hz compared to a global pitch of 239.5 Hz in the selection) and a pause of 0.25 seconds before. The presence of a pause and change of pitch marks an intona- tional unit. In the following section, we delve into the presence of pauses. As men- tioned earlier, Attardo, Pickering, and Baker (2011) have not found punch lines marked particularly by these intonation changes or pause. This was confirmed in our data: There is no pattern of the use of pause as humor marker. Nonetheless, the analyses below provide a couple of examples in the data for how pauses can be used in the context of humor. 3.3 Pauses Examples of pauses before or in the jab line in our corpus are rare. In 183 uses of humor we only found 15 cases of pauses. In other words, around eight percent of the jab lines were prefaced or accompanied by a pause. Therefore our data are consistent with Pickering et al. (2009) and Attardo, Pickering, and Baker (2011) regarding the amount of pauses and their status as humor marker. However, some examples are worth careful analysis as they show that pauses can have some roles in how humor is performed taking into account that humor also requires more time to process (see Wennerstrom 2011), and that surprise effects or, to some extent, different ways of evaluating the sentence such as if it was “an afterthought” as we will show next. According to Schaffer (1982: 45) and Haiman (1998: 39), long pauses between words can be used as a marker of humor tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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