Multi-layered analysis of laughter

Chiara Mazzocconi (1) , Ye Tian (2) , Jonathan Ginzburg (1, 3)

1 CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus
2 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle
3 LabEx EFL - LabEx Empirical Foundations of Linguistics

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 Chi-nese. 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.

Domains: Cognitive science

Chiara Mazzocconi, Ye Tian, Jonathan Ginzburg. Multi-layered analysis of laughter. 20th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Jul 2016, New Brunswick, United States. ⟨hal-01371159⟩