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Article published In:
Interdisciplinary approaches to the language of pop culture
Edited by Rocío Montoro and Valentin Werner
[English Text Construction 16:2] 2023
► pp. 214–237

Chick Lit

Characterisation through laughter-talk in conversational humour

| University of Granada
| University of Granada

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.

Keywords: humour, corpus-based analysis, popular fiction, female writing
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
Published online: 29 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.22028.mon
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