Understanding Laughter

Jonathan Ginzburg (1, 2) , Ellen Breitholtz (3) , Robin Cooper (3) , Julian Hough (4) , Ye Tian (5)

1 CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus
2 LabEx EFL - LabEx Empirical Foundations of Linguistics
3 GU - University of Gothenburg
4 Universität Bielefeld = Bielefeld University
5 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

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.

Domains: Cognitive science; Linguistics

Jonathan Ginzburg, Ellen Breitholtz, Robin Cooper, Julian Hough, Ye Tian. Understanding Laughter. 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2015, Amsterdam, Netherlands. ⟨hal-01371396⟩