Ethnopragmatic perspectives on conversational humour, with special reference to Australian English
Author(s)
Goddard, Cliff
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2017
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This paper argues that the ethnopragmatic approach allows humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to ward off conceptual Anglocentrism. It begins with a semantic inquiry into the word ‘laugh’, a plausible lexical universal and an essential anchor point for humour studies. It then demonstrates how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour research. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: ‘funny’, ‘amusing’, and ‘humour’. Cultural scripts ...
View more >This paper argues that the ethnopragmatic approach allows humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to ward off conceptual Anglocentrism. It begins with a semantic inquiry into the word ‘laugh’, a plausible lexical universal and an essential anchor point for humour studies. It then demonstrates how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour research. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: ‘funny’, ‘amusing’, and ‘humour’. Cultural scripts are proposed for “jocular abuse”, “deadpan jocular irony” and “jocular deception” in Australian English. The semantic explications and cultural scripts are composed using simple, cross-translatable words.
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View more >This paper argues that the ethnopragmatic approach allows humour researchers both to access the “insider perspectives” of native speakers and to ward off conceptual Anglocentrism. It begins with a semantic inquiry into the word ‘laugh’, a plausible lexical universal and an essential anchor point for humour studies. It then demonstrates how the two main modes of ethnopragmatic analysis, semantic explication and cultural scripts, can be applied to selected topics in conversational humour research. Semantic explications are proposed for three English specific “humour concepts”: ‘funny’, ‘amusing’, and ‘humour’. Cultural scripts are proposed for “jocular abuse”, “deadpan jocular irony” and “jocular deception” in Australian English. The semantic explications and cultural scripts are composed using simple, cross-translatable words.
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Journal Title
Language & Communication
Subject
Cognitive and computational psychology
Communication and media studies
Linguistics
Linguistics not elsewhere classified