Laughing about laughter: comparing conversational analysis, emotion psychology, and dialogical semantics (original) (raw)

Laughter in Conversation: Features of Occurrence and Acoustic Structure

Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 2000

Although human laughter mainly occurs in social contexts, most studies have dealt with laughter evoked by media. In our study, we investigated conversational laughter. Our results show that laughter is much more frequent than has been described previously by self-report studies. Contrary to the common view that laughter is elicited by external stimuli, participants frequently laughed after their own verbal utterances. We thus suggest that laughter in conversation may primarily serve to regulate the flow of interaction and to mitigate the meaning of the preceding utterance. Conversational laughter bouts consisted of a smaller number of laughter elements and had longer interval durations than laughter bouts elicited by media. These parameters also varied with conversational context. The high intraindividual variability in the acoustic parameters of laughter, which greatly exceeded the parameter variability between subjects, may thus be a result of the laughter context.

A multi-layered analysis Laughter

2016

This paper presents a multi-layered classification of laughter in French and Chinese dialogues (from the DUEL corpus). Analysis related to the form, the semantic meaning and the function of laughter and its context provides a detailed study of the range of uses of laughter and their distributions. A similar distribution was observed in most of the data collected for French and Chinese. We ground our classification in a formal semantic and pragmatic analysis. We propose that most functions of laughter can be analyzed by positing a unified meaning with two dimensions, which when aligned with rich contextual reasoning, yields a wide range of functions. However, we also argue that a proper treatment of laughter involves a significant conceptual modification of information state account of dialogue to incorporate emotive aspects of interaction.

Laughter as language

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2020

Understanding the import of laughter, has interested philosophers and literary scholars for millennia and, more recently, psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and linguists. However, the assumption has been that laughter lacks meaning akin to what words and phrases possess and that it does not contribute to the compositional construction of meaning. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, laughter (and other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, frowning) has propositional content—it involves reference to external real world events, has stand alone meanings, and participates in semantic and pragmatic processes like repair, implicature, and irony. We show how to develop a formal semantic and pragmatic account of laughter embedded in a general theory of conversational interaction and emotional reasoning and show how to explain the wide, indeed in principle unbounded range of uses laughter exhibits. We show how our account can be extended to other non-verbal social sig...

Laughter in interaction : semantics, pragmatics, and child development

Université de Paris, 2019

Science du Langage Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle-UMR 7110 Doctor of Philosophy Laughter in interaction: semantics, pragmatics, and child development by Chiara M Laughter is a social vocalization universal across cultures and languages. It is ubiquitous in our dialogues and able to serve a wide range of functions. Laughter has been studied from several perspectives, but the classifications proposed are hard to integrate. Despite being crucial in our daily interaction, relatively little attention has been devoted to the study of laughter in conversation, attempting to model its sophisticated pragmatic use, neuro-correlates in perception and development in children. In the current thesis a new comprehensive framework for laughter analysis is proposed, crucially grounded in the assumption that laughter has propositional content, arguing for the need to distinguish different layers of analysis, similarly to the study of speech: form, positioning, semantics and pragmatics. A formal representation of laughter meaning is proposed and a multilingual corpus study (French, Chinese and English) is conducted in order to test the proposed framework and to deepen our understanding of laughter use in adult conversation. Preliminary investigations are conducted on the viability of a laughter form-function mapping based on acoustic features and on the neuro-correlates involved in the perception of laughter serving different functions in natural dialogue. Our results give rise to novel generalizations about the placement, alignment, semantics and function of laughter, stressing the high pragmatic skills involved in its production and perception. The development of the semantic and pragmatic use of laughter is observed in a longitudinal corpus study of 4 American-English child-mother pairs from 12 to 36 months of age. Results show that laughter use undergoes important development at each level analysed, which complies with what could be hypothesised on the base of phylogenetic data, and that laughter can be an effective means to track cognitive/communicative development, and potential difficulties or delays at a very early stage.

Identifying action: Laughter in non-humorous reported speech

Journal of Pragmatics, 2012

This paper examines the construction of a single action in interaction by means of one of its characteristic features: laughter. It examines laughter in a particular sequential context: direct reported speech which is itself not humorous. It emerges that the laughter plays a pivotal role in the construction of this particular action; furthermore, there is striking evidence pointing to the fine calibration of the production of laughter. There are clear methodological implications for Pragmatics in this consideration of a non-linguistic but pervasive feature of interaction.

Multi-layered analysis of laughter

This paper presents a multi-layered classification of laughter in French and Chinese dialogues (from the DUEL corpus). Analysis related to the form, the semantic meaning and the function of laughter and its context provides a detailed study of the range of uses of laughter and their distributions. A similar distribution was observed in most of the data collected for French and Chinese. We ground our classification in a formal semantic and pragmatic analysis. We propose that most functions of laughter can be analyzed by positing two main meanings, which when aligned with rich contextual reasoning, yields a wide range of functions. However, we also argue that a proper treatment of laughter involves a significant conceptual modification of information state account of dialogue to incorporate emotive aspects of interaction.

Social Context Disambiguates the Interpretation of Laughter

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

Despite being a pan-cultural phenomenon, laughter is arguably the least understood behaviour deployed in social interaction. As well as being a response to humour, it has other important functions including promoting social affiliation, developing cooperation and regulating competitive behaviours. This multi-functional feature of laughter marks it as an adaptive behaviour central to facilitating social cohesion. However, it is not clear how laughter achieves this social cohesion. We consider two approaches to understanding how laughter facilitates social cohesion - the 'representational' approach and the 'affect-induction' approach. The representational approach suggests that laughter conveys information about the expresser's emotional state, and the listener decodes this information to gain knowledge about the laugher's felt state. The affect-induction approach views laughter as a tool to influence the affective state of listeners. We describe a modified ver...

THE PRAGMATIC FUNCTION OF LAUGHTER: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ENGLISH, INDONESIAN AND SUNDANESE

The present thesis investigates the multifaceted nature of laughter and its pragmatic function in English, Indonesian, and Sundanese data. Drawing upon the taxonomy of laughter function by Mazzocconi et al. (2020), the primary objective is to assess the extent to which their classification framework can effectively predict the distribution of laughter functions in Indonesian and Sundanese, given their distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics that set them apart from Western cultures. An extensive analysis of three distinct corpora reveals noteworthy similarities in the distribution of laughter functions. However, as anticipated, some differences arise regarding the organization of laughter within conversational contexts. Specifically, the British National Corpus (BNC) reveals a general pattern wherein laughter accompanied by self-mockery tends to be followed by an agreement by the interlocutor. Conversely, in the Indonesian and Sundanese corpora, a distinct trend is observed, where laughter accompanied by self-mockery is often accompanied by expressions of disagreement by the interlocutor. This contrast underscores the culture-specific nature of laughter organization and highlights the profound influence of cultural factors on the communicative dynamics surrounding laughter.

Laughter in French Spontaneous Conversational Dialogs

2016

This paper presents a quantitative description of laughter in height 1-hour French spontaneous conversations. The paper includes the raw figures for laughter as well as more details concerning inter-individual variability. It firstly describes to what extent the amount of laughter and their durations varies from speaker to speaker in all dialogs. In a second suite of analyses, this paper compares our corpus with previous analyzed corpora. In a final set of experiments, it presents some facts about overlapping laughs. This paper have quantified these all effects in free-style conversations, for the first time.