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Laughing our bonds off: Conversational humour in relation to affiliation by Naomi K. Knight is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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The laughter that proliferates in casual conversation between friends indicates that humour is a common device in talk that does important social work. However, this humour does not involve recognisable joking structures but rather highly implicit meanings that are interpreted only by those who appear to be “in on the joke”. This thesis considers the functions of this “unfunny” type of humour, called convivial conversational humour, by focusing on the social relations at stake in conversations between friends in the Canadian context. Through a functional discourse analysis (Martin & Rose, 2007) of phases (cf. Gregory & Malcolm, 1995[1981]) of co-constructed humour in conversation, it is found that evaluative meanings bound with ideational experience (evaluative couplings) are the cause of laughter in these phases, and that these construe a social process of affiliation. Building on notions of bonding (e.g. Boxer & Cortès-Conde, 1997; Martin, 2004b; Stenglin, 2004) and coupling (Martin, 2000a), this thesis develops a model of affiliation to account for how we identify ourselves communally as members of a culture and create social bonds through language. Through the analysis of humor

Who reads Laughing our bonds off: Conversational humour in relation to affiliation?

Author

Naomi K. Knight

Publisher

Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney

Published

2010

Language

EN

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Linguistics, Language