Publications

Publication details [#54491]

Bertrand, Roxane and Béatrice Priego-Valverde. 2011. Does prosody play a specific role in conversational humor? Pragmatics & Cognition 19 (2) : 333–356.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

This paper uses Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate conversational humor in talk-in-interaction. It attempts to better understand how the latter is produced and co-constructed by participants in accounting for the devices used by participants in their sequential environment. The framework of CA enables to take into account the various means available to speakers to communicate, orient to the others, etc. From the data, reported speech, confirmation request/answer, and repetitions appear as the main discursive devices to create humor (presented as the result of the appearance of the incongruity). The paper focused on prosodic cues that are strongly involved in these devices and then contribute to the humorous tonality of the talk. Finally, the co-construction of conversational humor is mainly described through the notion of orientation and prosodic orientation.