We investigated the effect of culture and social status on sarcasm interpretation. Two hundred U.K. participants and 200 Chinese participants read scenarios in which the final comment could be either literal or sarcastic criticism and the speaker had equal, higher, or lower social status compared to the recipient. Comments were rated on degree of…

Through the lens of conversational analysis (CA), humor or funniness is not an inherent property of a message, nor an internal state of any social action, but as something interactionally achieved (Glenn, 2003). Teachers are often encouraged to utilize humor to reduce anxiety, lower affective filters, and make language more "memorable"…

This dissertation asks what young children do with style at a time when their social and linguistic worlds begin to expand beyond the home, into the peer group. Grounded in a yearlong ethnography of a preschool classroom in the San Francisco Bay Area, I show how play moved gradually from indoors to outdoors as children got older. This shift…

The article deals with the analysis of the addressee's factor foregrounding in the limerick discourse. The study demonstrates that the limerick discourse is characterised by an addresser-writer's and an addressee-reader/listener's reciprocality via idiosyncratic protagonists portrayed by an addresser-writer. A limerick presents a laconic…

This paper will analyze the function of final particle "yo", and factors that may affect the use of "yo" in order to avoid FTAs if there is any. The data used in this paper is a transcription of a 10-minute unscripted excerpt from a Japanese comedy variety show called "Shabekuri 007". The excerpt was first aired on…

This study investigated how managers, entry-level employees, and hiring professionals in the optics and photonics industry socialize each other to enact the communication norms and expectations in their workplaces. A qualitative analysis of transcripts from interviews conducted with 33 employees at 15 companies produced five prevalent themes…

In this qualitative linguistic ethnography, we combine a multilingual perspective on translanguaging with humanizing pedagogies to examine how and for what purposes a second-grade teacher and her students used Spanish and English in support of language development during a literacy-based English Language Development block within a paired literacy…

The recent decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in the body of research that examine the relationship between humour and language acquisition. This study, however, uses the microanalytical approach of Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate the impact of the teachers' competent use of the first language (L1) as a source of humour on…

Although research has investigated laughter in professional communication settings, fewer studies have explored laughter-talk in second language (L2) classrooms. This study examines L2 university students' use of laughter-talk in peer group conversation to understand the linguistics of affect and its interactional effects. The author draws upon…

In the context of texts that depicted either a minimally confrontational conversation (study 1) or a more confrontational argument (study 2) with a close friend, the use of ironic criticism was rated as being more humorous, polite, and positive, yet also as more sarcastic and mocking than direct criticism. Although our results were consistent with…

In the research literature on interactional competence in talk among second language speakers and their coparticipants, this volume of "Pragmatics & Interaction" is the first to focus on interaction in Japanese. The chapters examine the use and development of interactional practices in a wide range of social settings, from everyday…

This article demonstrates, using conversation analysis, how students use address terms when reproaching the teacher. The data consist of videotaped lessons of Finnish as a second language in secondary school. The analyses show, first of all, that teacher-oriented address terms can be used separately as reproaches, in which case they are marked…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

Four activities for language learning are presented, including: class completion of incomplete dialogues excerpted from major literary works; games for learning vocabulary and civilization using words beginning with the same letter; a lesson using cartoons to elicit description and dialogues; and a unit on appropriate and inappropriate…

Listeners generally rate speakers of high initial ethos (such as university professors) using mildly self-deprecating humor highly on traits like "wittiness" and "funniness." A three-part study investigated whether a speaker of lower initial ethos (such as a student) can "get away" with such self-deprecation. In Experiment 1, college students read…