Communicative strategies in interactional male humour
A study of (im)politeness
This paper will present an analysis of male interactional
humour in Spanish conversation. Humour can appear in such
conversations as a strategy to show (im)politeness between
participants in the interaction. Focussing in particular on
politeness strategies, we will seek to identify the different types
of humour that arise in conversations between men. To this end, we
will draw on Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness ([1978] 1987: 213), which
lists a number of strategies that aim to produce politeness and, at
the same time, calculates the estimated risk of losing face that
arises from an individual’s conversational behaviour. In the
analysis we will also consider Spencer-Oatey’s (2000, 2007) proposal of a set of factors that can
affect rapport management strategies. Our aim is to show that humour
as expressed between men in conversational utterances, involves
conversational strategies that are used to elicit respect for both
listener and speaker, or to save the negative and positive face of
these, according to politeness criteria. To this end, the
VALESCO.HUMOR corpus is used, which comprises 148 ironic-humorous
sequences extracted from 67 colloquial conversations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Some considerations on verbal humour
- 3.The theory of politeness in humorous utterances
- 4.Laughter in humorous utterances
- 5.Analysis of the corpus: Men in humorous conversation
- 6.Conclusions
-
Notes
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References