The Multimodal Expression of Humour in University Lectures: Some Insights for ESP

Humour scholarship is a fertile interdisciplinary field drawing from psychology, sociology, and linguistic pragmatics to enhance our understanding of how people engage in humour during social interaction. This multi-faceted nature has stimulated considerable interest among discourse analysts who have investigated the expression of humour in a variety of communicative situations. In academic settings, some studies have described the linguistic features of humour found in lecture discourse (Nesi, 2012; Wang, 2014), highlighting a rich range of functions and interpersonal meanings. Yet non-verbal cues, such as gesturing, gaze, and prosody, also have an important role in communicating humorous intention in oral academic discourse (Fortanet Gómez & Ruiz-Madrid, 2016). The aim of this paper is to explore how university lecturers convey humour both linguistically and extra-linguistically from the perspective of intersemiotic complementarity. The analysis is based on video-recordings of lectures and their corresponding transcripts extracted from an annotated multimodal corpus of video clips designed for use in ESP settings. The methodological approach integrated corpus software to identify linguistic expressions of humour with multimodal annotation software to display and analyse co-occurring non-verbal cues. The results suggest that linguistic and extra-linguistic features have a synergistic relationship in humorous episodes, which may be grounded in culture-specific meanings and thus potentially problematic for L2 listeners. The findings can be used to inform teaching strategies for assisting ESP learners in successfully processing humour as a particularly challenging task for them on both the cognitive and linguistic levels.