The linguistic expression of humour is a multifaceted area of research that encompasses the cognitive, semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic processes that come into play during humorous episodes (Dynel, 2009). Although much of this work has involved conversational data (e.g., Norrick & Bubel, 2009; Dynel, 2011; Haugh 2016), some scholars have also looked at humorous episodes in spoken academic discourse, representing a more formal register within an institutional setting and with applications for English language teaching (e.g., Lee, 2006; Nesi, 2012; Wang, 2014; Tzoannopoulou, 2016). However, there has been little attention to humour in spoken academic discourse that highlights possible variation in relation to the specialised discourse domains with which English language learners often must grapple. The aim of this contribution is to explore how humour emerges across a range of specialized discourse domains in various genres that can be harnessed for use specifically in ESP settings. The analysis is based on small corpus comprised of the transcripts of a series of video clips representing six specialized discourse domains commonly addressed in ESP (i.e., business/economics, law, political science, medicine, science/technology, and tourism) and three largely monologic instructional/informative genres (i.e., university classroom lectures, Talks at Google, and TedTalks) as instances of authentic language in different interactional settings that are particularly suitable and adaptable to ESP research and practice. The corpus was extracted from a larger multimodal corpus of video clips designed and compiled for use in ESP settings, which also includes speech transcripts that have been manually annotated with ad-hoc tags to mark episodes reflecting speakers’ use of humour. Corpus software was then used to conduct tag-based queries to identify expressions of humour. These were then subjected to in-depth qualitative analysis of their semantic and pragmatic features with reference to theories of verbal humour involving incongruity and superiority (Attardo & Raskin, 1989), in order to reveal trends in relation to the types of humour across the corpus. The results suggest that humorous episodes encode a range of types (e.g. self-deprecation, disparagement, word play) and functions (e.g., rapport building, reinforcing expert identity), according to Nesi’s (2012) framework for analysing laughter in academic lectures. Moreover, humorous episodes were found across all six discourse domains, even if they were more prominent in the softer disciplines (business/economics, law, political science, tourism) as compared to the harder disciplines (medicine, science/technology). Given the cognitive and linguistic difficulties experienced by English language learners in processing humour (Bell, 2017), the findings provide useful insights that specifically target ESP research and practice.
Chapter 10. Analysing humour across ESP genres and discourse domains : a corpus-assisted analysis
Crawford Camiciottoli, B.
2023-01-01
Abstract
The linguistic expression of humour is a multifaceted area of research that encompasses the cognitive, semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic processes that come into play during humorous episodes (Dynel, 2009). Although much of this work has involved conversational data (e.g., Norrick & Bubel, 2009; Dynel, 2011; Haugh 2016), some scholars have also looked at humorous episodes in spoken academic discourse, representing a more formal register within an institutional setting and with applications for English language teaching (e.g., Lee, 2006; Nesi, 2012; Wang, 2014; Tzoannopoulou, 2016). However, there has been little attention to humour in spoken academic discourse that highlights possible variation in relation to the specialised discourse domains with which English language learners often must grapple. The aim of this contribution is to explore how humour emerges across a range of specialized discourse domains in various genres that can be harnessed for use specifically in ESP settings. The analysis is based on small corpus comprised of the transcripts of a series of video clips representing six specialized discourse domains commonly addressed in ESP (i.e., business/economics, law, political science, medicine, science/technology, and tourism) and three largely monologic instructional/informative genres (i.e., university classroom lectures, Talks at Google, and TedTalks) as instances of authentic language in different interactional settings that are particularly suitable and adaptable to ESP research and practice. The corpus was extracted from a larger multimodal corpus of video clips designed and compiled for use in ESP settings, which also includes speech transcripts that have been manually annotated with ad-hoc tags to mark episodes reflecting speakers’ use of humour. Corpus software was then used to conduct tag-based queries to identify expressions of humour. These were then subjected to in-depth qualitative analysis of their semantic and pragmatic features with reference to theories of verbal humour involving incongruity and superiority (Attardo & Raskin, 1989), in order to reveal trends in relation to the types of humour across the corpus. The results suggest that humorous episodes encode a range of types (e.g. self-deprecation, disparagement, word play) and functions (e.g., rapport building, reinforcing expert identity), according to Nesi’s (2012) framework for analysing laughter in academic lectures. Moreover, humorous episodes were found across all six discourse domains, even if they were more prominent in the softer disciplines (business/economics, law, political science, tourism) as compared to the harder disciplines (medicine, science/technology). Given the cognitive and linguistic difficulties experienced by English language learners in processing humour (Bell, 2017), the findings provide useful insights that specifically target ESP research and practice.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
