Abstract : Laughter is pervasive in human conversation (more than 30k tokens in the dialogue part of the British National Corpus (BNC) (approx. 1 of every 14 turns (n = 430k).)). Most laughter is not triggered by humorous stimuli1 and close to half of all laughter events are reactions to one’s own speech (e.g., [20]). In this paper, we demonstrate that laughter needs to be integrated with lexically and phrasally produced import—arguing against the common assumption (see e.g., [10]) that laughter has no propositional content. Following this we develop a semantic- pragmatic analysis: we show how relatively general meanings, aligned with contextually–driven reasoning lead to a variety of disparate inferences.
https://hal-univ-paris.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01371396
Contributor : Jonathan Ginzburg <>
Submitted on : Monday, September 26, 2016 - 6:12:07 PM Last modification on : Monday, December 28, 2020 - 4:54:02 PM Long-term archiving on: : Tuesday, December 27, 2016 - 12:41:35 PM
Jonathan Ginzburg, Ellen Breitholtz, Robin Cooper, Julian Hough, Ye Tian. Understanding Laughter. 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2015, Amsterdam, Netherlands. ⟨hal-01371396⟩