Chick Lit
Characterisation through laughter-talk in conversational humour
In this paper, we look at characterisation in the popular fiction genre Chick Lit by analysing laughter-talk in
conversational humour. This is the first systematic analysis of how a variety of humour phenomena are linguistically realised in
the genre despite humour being as aspect recurrently referred to as intrinsic to the genre. We use a combination of methods, both
corpus-based and qualitative in nature, to identify instances in which laughter occurs, which we (broadly) associate with the
presence of humour. Thus, with the use of self-compiled corpora, we assess the nature of humorous mechanisms in the genre. We
conclude by arguing that humorous encounters are genre-defining and essential for characterisation. Humour analysis allows us to
argue that Chick Lit protagonists are prototypically presented as non-aggressive, non-threatening individuals, which also
contributes to the depiction of down-to-earth characters readers expect in the genre.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Chick Lit and conversational humour through laughter-talk
- 3.Methodology, data and research questions
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Corpus-based analysis
- 4.2Conversational humour
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References