Laughter as a Face Management Device in Turkish: Evidence from Turkish Spoken Corpus

Year 2013, Volume: 10 Issue: 2, 75 - 100, 14.11.2013

Banu Başaran

Abstract

Abstract: Laughter, being a significant part of interaction, has been found to have important functions. Goffman (1967) and Brown & Levinson (1987)’s theories in relation with politeness are one of the major approaches to interaction that inter-relate with the function of laughter in discourse. This study aims to examine how laughter is used to achieve politeness according to Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and Goffman’s concept of face (Goffman, 1972). For the purpose of this study, 26 laughter tokens out of 729 from the publishable files in Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC) are examined. EXAKT 1.2 is used to examine and retrieve tokens of laughter.  The study shows that laughter is used by speakers for maintaining and saving positive and negative face. Laughter is not only used for maintaining one’s own face but also employed for saving the face of others.

Key words: Politeness, Laughter, Spoken Turkish Corpus, Face-threatening act, Face-work

Keywords

İncelik, Gülme, Sözlü Türkçe Derlemi, Yüzü tehdit edici eylem, Yüze yönelik eylemler

References

• Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic theories of humor. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bauer, S. (2010). Can humor and politeness be combined? Analysis of the series “Friends”. München: GRIN Verlag.
• Bergson, H. (1900) Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic.
• Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Glenn, P. J. (2003). Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. New York: Doubleday Anchor.
• Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Holt, E. (2010). The last laugh: Shared laughter and topic termination. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1513-1525.
• Jefferson, G. (1984). On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles. In J.M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 346–369). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Jefferson, G. (1985). An Exercise in the Transcription and Analysis of Laughter. In T. A. van Dijk (eds.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis, vol 3, Discourse and Dialogue, (25-34). London: Academic.
• Jefferson, G., Sacks, H. & Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Notes on laughter in the pursuit of intimacy. In G. Button & John R.E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organisation (pp. 152-205). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Norrick, N. R. & Spitz, A. (2008). Humor as a resource for mitigating conflict in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1661-1686.
• Partington, A. (2006). The linguistics of laughter: A corpus-assisted study of laughter talk. New York: Routledge.
• Priego-Valverde, B. (2009). Failed humor in conversation: A double voicing analysis. In Neal, R. N., Delia C. (Eds.), Humor in interaction (pp. 165-184). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Provine, R. (2000). Laughter: A scientific investigation. New York: Viking. 100 B Ç BAŞARAN
• Ruhi, Ş., Eryılmaz, K., & Acar, M. G. C. (2012, May) A platform for creating multimodal and multilingual spoken corpora for Turkic languages: Insights from the Turkish Speoken Corpus. Paper presented at the First Workshop on Language Resources and Technologies for Turkic Languages, LREC 2012. İstanbul, 57-63. Retrieved from http://www.lrec-conf.org/preceedings/lrec2012/workshops/02.Turkic%20Languag es%20Proceedings.pdf
• Spoken Turkish Corpus. http://stc.org.tr