Cover not available
Part of
Handbook of Pragmatics: 25th Annual Installment
Edited by Frank Brisard, Sigurd D’hondt, Pedro Gras and Mieke Vandenbroucke
[Handbook of Pragmatics 25] 2022
► pp. 156–176

Teasing

| The University of Queensland
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Definitions, related practices and terms
  • 3.Production of teasing
  • 4.Functions
  • 5.Response to teasing
  • 6.The metapragmatics of teasing
  • 7.Teasing and (im)politeness
  • 8.Teasing and identity construction
  • 9.Future directions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.25.tea1
References (96)
References
Attardo, Salvatore. 2020. “Humor.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 155–181. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bell, Nancy D. 2007. “How native and non-native English speakers adapt to humor in intercultural interaction.” Humor 20 (1): 27–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bi, Xiaoyi, and Elizabeth Marsden. 2020. “Managing interpersonal relationships: Teasing as a method of professional identity construction.” Journal of Pragmatics 165: 18–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Birolini, Christophe. 2022. “‘Some people work at bit more than me, and so we tease them’: The production of an elite student community in an elite French higher education institution.” Humor 35 (1): 5–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boxer, Diana, and Florencia Cortés-Conde. 1997. “From bonding and biting: Conversational joking and identity display.” Journal of Pragmatics 27: 275–295. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brône, Geert. 2008. “Hyper- and misunderstanding in interactional humor.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (12): 2027–2061. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buttny, Richard. 2001. “Therapeutic humor in retelling the clients’ tellings.” Text 21 (3): 303–326.Google Scholar
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, and Michael Haugh. 2020. “The metapragmatics of ‘teasing’ in Taiwanese Chinese conversational humour.” The European Journal of Humour Research 8 (4): 7–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. “Teasing and claims to non-serious intent in Chinese talk shows.” East Asian Pragmatics 6 (2): 135–159. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, Michael Haugh, and Hsi-Yao Su. (2021). “Taking it too far: the role of ideological discourses in contesting the limits of teasing and offence.” Pragmatics 31 (3): 382–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, and Valeria Sinkeviciute. (2022). “The role of ‘familiarity’ in Mandarin Chinese speakers’ metapragmatic evaluations of Australian conversational humour.” The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (2): 74–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Choi, Seongsook, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2016. “Enacting and negotiating power relations through teasing in distributed leadership constellations.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (3): 482–502. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. “Impoliteness.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh, and Valeria Sinkeviciute. 2017. “(Im)politeness and mixed messages.” In Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 323–355. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deppermann, Arnulf, and Michael Haugh. 2022. Action Ascription in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drew, Paul. 1987. “Po-faced receipts of teases.” Linguistics 25 (1): 219–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dynel, Marta. 2008. “No aggression, only teasing: The pragmatics of teasing and banter.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4 (2): 241–261. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Beyond a joke: Types of conversational humour.” Language and Linguistics Compass. Semantics and Pragmatics 3: 1284–1299. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. “Joker in the pack: Towards determining the status of humorous framing in conversations.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 217–241. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. “Impoliteness as disaffiliative humour in film talk.” In Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory, ed. by Marta Dynel, 105–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. “Conceptualizing conversational humour as (im)politeness: The case of film talk.” Journal of Politeness Research 12 (1): 117–147. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, Ann. R. 1986. “Teasing: Verbal play in two Mexicano homes.” In Language Socialization Across Cultures: Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, ed. by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 182–198. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Espelage, Dorothy L., and Christine S. Asidao. 2001. “Conversations with middle school students about bullying and victimization.” Journal of Emotional Abuse 2 (2–3): 49–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feyaerts, Kurt, Geert Brône, and Robin De Ceukelaire. 2015. “The art of teasing: A corpus study of teasing sequences in American sitcoms between 1990 and 1999.” In Cognitive Linguistics and Humor Research, ed. by Geert Brône, Kurt Feyaerts and Tony Veale, 215–242. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
File, Kieran, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2019. “That match was ‘a bit like losing your virginity’. Failed humour, face and identity construction in TV interviews with professional athletes and coaches.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 132–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Geyer, Naomi. 2010. “Teasing and ambivalent face in Japanese multi-party discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 2120–2130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Glenn, Phillip, and Elizabeth Holt. 2015. “Laughter.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2018. “‘Joking, kidding, teasing’: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor.” Intercultural Pragmatics 15 (4): 487–514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Gong, Lili, and Yongping Ran. 2020. “Discursive constraints of teasing: Constructing professionality via teasing in Chinese entertainment interviews.” Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics 43 (1): 64–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gradin Franzén, Anna, and Karin Aronsson. 2013. “Teasing, laughing and disciplinary humor: Staff–youth interaction in detention home treatment.” Discourse Studies 15 (2): 167–183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Habib, Rania. 2008. “Humor and disagreement: Identity construction and cross-cultural enrichment.” Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1117–1145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haddington, Pentti. 2011. “Serious or non-serious? Sequential ambiguity and disavowing a prior stance.” Functions of Language 18: 149–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael. 2010. “Jocular mockery, (dis)affiliation, and face.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (8): 2106–2119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. “Humour, face and im/politeness in getting acquainted.” In Situated Politeness, ed. by Bethan L. Davies, Michael Haugh and Andrew John Merrison, 165–184. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
. 2014. “Jocular mockery as interactional practice in everyday Anglo-Australian conversation.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 34(1): 76–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2016. “‘Just kidding’: Teasing and claims to non-serious intent.” Journal of Pragmatics 95: 120–136. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017a. “Teasing.” In Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. by Salvatore Attardo, 204–218. New York and London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017b. “Mockery and (non-)seriousness in initial interactions amongst American and Australian speakers of English.” In Handbook of Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. by Donal Carbaugh, 104–177. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haugh, Michael, and Derek Bousfield. 2012. “Mock impoliteness in interactions amongst Australian and British speakers of English.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1099–1114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael, and Danielle Pillet-Shore. 2018. “Getting to know you: teasing as an invitation to intimacy in initial interactions.” Discourse Studies 20 (2): 246–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haugh, Michael, and Lara Weinglass. 2020. “‘The Great Australian Pastime’: Pragmatic and semantic perspectives on taking the piss.” In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication: Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis, ed. by Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters and Lauren Sadow, 95–117. Singapore: Springer Singapore. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John. 2012. “Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 2000. “Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the workplace.” Discourse Studies 2: 159–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2005. “Politeness, humor and gender in the workplace: Negotiating norms and identifying contestation.” Journal of Politeness Research 1: 121–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holt, Elizabeth. 2010. “The last laugh: Shared laughter and topic termination.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1513–1525. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013. “‘There’s many a true word said in jest’: Seriousness and nonseriousness in interaction.” In Studies of Laughter in Interaction, ed. by Phillip Glenn and Elizabeth Holt, 69–89. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hutchby, Ian, and Robin Wooffitt. 2002. Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Idevall Hagren, Karin. 2020. “Membership categorisation analysis.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 41–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnsen, Ragni Vik. 2020. “Teasing and policing in a multilingual family. Negotiating and subverting norms and social hierarchies.” Journal of Pragmatics 158: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Andrea Szalai. 2020. “The socialisation of interactional rituals: A case study of ritual cursing as a form of teasing in Romani.” Pragmatics 30 (1): 15–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kasper, Gabriele. 1996. “Politeness.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman, Jef Verschueren, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keltner, Dacher, Randall C. Young, Erin A. Heerey, Carmen Oemig, and Natalie D. Monarch. 1998. “Teasing in hierarchical and intimate relations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (5): 1231–1247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga. 1996. “Impoliteness and conversational joking: On relational politics.” Folia Linguistica 30 (3–4): 299–326. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. “Oral genres of humor: On the dialectic of genre knowledge and creative authoring.” Pragmatics 17 (2): 263–296.Google Scholar
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lightner, Robin M., Jullie M. Bollmer, Monica J. Harris, Richard Milich, and Douglas J. Scambler. 2000. “What do you say to teasers? Parent and child evaluations of responses to teasing.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 21 (4): 403–427. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Looney, Stephen Daniel. 2021. “Classroom teasing: Institutional contingencies and embodied action.” Discourse Studies 23 (4): 519–538. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lytra, Vally. 2007. “Teasing in contact encounters: Frames, participant positions and responses.” Multilingua 26: 381–408. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Constructing academic hierarchies: Teasing and identity work among peers at school.” Pragmatics 19 (3): 449–466.Google Scholar
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen. 2015. “Jocular mockery in computer-mediated communication: A contrastive study of a Spanish and English Facebook community.” Journal of Politeness Research 11 (2): 289–327. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mak, Bernie Chun Nam. 2018. “Humour in the workplace.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace, ed. by Bernadette Vine, 228–241. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moody, Stephen J. 2019. “Contextualizing macro-level identities and constructing inclusiveness through teasing and self-mockery: A view from the intercultural workplace in Japan.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 145–159. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Partington, Alan. 2006. The Linguistics of Laughter: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter-Talk. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “Teasing at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of face work in performing and responding to teases.” Text & Talk 28 (6): 771–792. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pawluk, Cheryl J. 1989. “Social construction of teasing.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 19 (2): 145–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pichler, Pia. 2006. “Multifunctional teasing as a resource for identity construction in the talk of British Bangladeshi girls”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (2): 225–249. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. “‘He’s got Jheri curls and Tims on’: Humour and indexicality as resources for authentication in young men’s talk about hair and fashion style.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 172–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plester, Barbara A., and Janet Sayers. 2007. “‘Taking the piss’: Functions of banter in the IT industry.” Humor 20 (2): 157–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Priego-Valverde, Béatrice. 2016. “Teasing in casual conversations: An opportunistic discursive strategy.” In Metapragmatics of Humor: Current Research Trends, ed. by Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo, 215–233. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 1940. “On joking relationships.” Africa 13: 195–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, ed. by Gail Jefferson. Massachusetts: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50: 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schnurr, Stephanie. 2009. “Constructing leader identities through teasing at work.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1125–1138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schnurr, Stephanie, and Angela Chan. 2011. “When laughter is not enough. Responding to teasing and self-denigrating humour at work.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 20–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shardakova, Maria. 2017. “Politeness, teasing, and humor.” In Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. by Salvatore Attardo, 219–233. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shively, Rachel L. 2013. “Learning to be funny in Spanish during study abroad: L2 humor development.” The Modern Language Journal 97 (4): 930–946. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinkeviciute, Valeria. 2013. “Decoding encoded (im)politeness: ‘Cause on my teasing you can depend’.” In Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory, ed. by Marta Dynel, 263–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. “‘When a joke’s a joke and when it’s too much’: Mateship as a key to interpreting jocular FTAs in Australian English.” Journal of Pragmatics 60: 121–139. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017a. “‘Everything he says to me it’s like he stabs me in the face’: Frontstage and backstage reactions to teasing.” In Multiple Perspectives on Language Play, ed. by Nancy Bell, 169–198. Boston and Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2017b. “What makes teasing impolite in Australian and British English? ‘Step[ping] over those lines […] you shouldn’t be crossing’.” Journal of Politeness Research 13 (2): 175–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017c. “Funniness and ‘the preferred reaction’ to jocularity in Australian and British English: An analysis of interviewees’ metapragmatic comments.” Language & Communication 55: 41–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017d. “‘It’s just a bit of cultural […] lost in translation’: Australian and British intracultural and intercultural metapragmatic evaluations of jocularity.” Lingua 197: 50–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019a. Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019b. “Juggling identities in interviews: The metapragmatics of ‘doing humour’.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 216–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019c (ed.). The interplay between humour and identity construction. Journal of Pragmatics 152. [URL]
Skalicky, Stephen, Cynthia M. Berger, and Nancy D. Bell. 2015. “The functions of ‘just kidding’ in American English.” Journal of Pragmatics 85: 18–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Straehle, Carolyn. 1993. “‘Samuel?’ ‘Yes, Dear?’ Teasing and conversational rapport.” In Framing in Discourse, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 210–230. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tholander, Michael, and Karin Aronsson. 2002. “Teasing as serious business: Collaborative staging and response work.” Text 22 (4): 559–595.Google Scholar
Tong, Ying, and Chaoqun Xie. 2021. “Complaining, teasing, and meme-framing: Socializing through Moments storytelling.” Internet Pragmatics 5 (1): 66–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walkinshaw, Ian. 2016. “Teasing in informal contexts in English as an Asian lingua franca.” Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 5 (2): 249–271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zajdman, Anat. 1995. “Humorous face-threatening acts: Humor as strategy.” Journal of Pragmatics 23: 325–339. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zare, Javad. 2016. “Self-mockery: A study of Persian multi-party interactions.” Text and Talk 36 (6): 789–812. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Dynel, Marta
2023. Irony and Humor. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 237 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Irony, Affect, and Related Figures. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 235 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.