Article published in:
Metapragmatics of Humor: Current research trends
Edited by Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 14] 2016
► pp. 193–214

Variability, adaptability and negotiability in conversational humor

A matter of gender

| University of Alicante, GRIALE Research Group
The present study has as its aim to analyze conversational utterances containing humor produced by men and women from the pragmatic perspective of Verschueren (2002), ultimately seeking to check whether discrepancies exist between the respective strategies that they use. In most cases, the interlocutors utilize different linguistic procedures to adapt their utterance –or not– to the humorous mode, by means of various conversational strategies that will depend both on gender and on the contextual situation. It all is determined by the nature of the corpus gathered as well as by the concepts of variability, adaptability and negotiability described by Verschueren (1999, 2002). Briz and the Val.Es.Co. Group’s Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales [Corpus of Colloquial Conversations], which is currently going through a digitization process, was used to achieve our aims. The analysis showed us that, when humor appears, each gender’s identity is defined through different strategies and procedures to adapt to the context.
Keywords: negotiability, adaptability, variability, conversational strategies, image
Published online: 24 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.14.10alv
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