Laughter in professional meetings: The organization of an emergent ethnic joke

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.01.013

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 42, Issue 6, June 2010, Pages 1526-1542

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.01.013 Get rights and content

Abstract

On the basis of a single case analysis of the emergence of an ethnic joke, this paper explores issues related to laughter in international business meetings. More particularly, it deals with ways in which a person's name is correctly pronounced. Speakers and co-participants seem to orient towards ‘proper’ ways of vocalizing names and to consequent ‘variations’ or ‘deviations’ from them, making different ways of pronunciation available as a laughable. In making such pronunciation variations available, accountable and recognizable, participants reflexively establish as relevant the multilingual character of the activity, of the participants’ competences and of the setting; conversely, they exploit these multilingual features within specific social practices, leading to laughter.

Our analysis focuses on the contexts of action, the sequential environments and the interactional practices by which the uttering of a name becomes a ‘laughable’ and then a resource for an ethnic joke. Moreover, it explores the implications of transforming the pronunciation into a laughable in terms of the organization of the ongoing activity, changing participation frameworks and membership categorizations. In this sense, it highlights the flexible structure of groups and the way in which laughter reconfigures them through local affiliating and disaffiliating moves, and by making various national categories available and relevant.

Section snippets

Vassiliki Markaki is a PhD student of Linguistics at the University of Lyon 2, France. She is writing her thesis within the European project “Language Dynamics and Diversity in Europe”. She works in the area of Conversation Analysis and Workplace Studies on the collaborative practices in multilingual meetings.

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Giving information in cosmetics sales interactions: Exploring some interactional functions of the Mandarin response token dui
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She commences with a loud, high pitched dan ‘but’, and begins to describe how the texture feels when applied to the face. S, again, overlaps C, and attempts to collaboratively complete her turn, proffering bu hui you le ‘will not be oily’ (Lerner, 2004; Hayashi, 2003; Markaki et al., 2010). This is contrary to her previous assertion, and is likely sensitive to C's dan ‘but’ preface at line 4 (Szczepek-Reed, 2015).
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Thus here, the interlocutors jointly refer to the genre of toasting as a category-bound activity associated with Georgians (cf. Day, 2013). In the example, the interlocutors exploit the source context evoked (i.e. the elaborate Georgian ritual of toasting) in order to ridicule (cf. Markaki et al., 2010). In the remaining sequences of their allusive talk, they associate this context of toasting with their jointly devised performance by having their category animation of a typical Georgian toast the Russian military pilot who is attacking him (lines 32–34).
In casual conversations, interlocutors often merely hint at intertextual references. The elusive design of such references ranges from extremely truncated or modified quotes, or mentions of names, to the rendition of generic patterns and enregistered (Agha, 2007) varieties associated with social or ethnic stereotypes. The paper refers to such non-explicitly marked references as allusions and discusses the methodological challenges posed by their detection and analysis. Qualitative analyses of four conversational episodes illustrate how Russian speakers and interlocutors draw on such allusions and playfully exploit the meaning potential of the (con-)text referenced. The talk that thereby emerges points, in various ways, to the recognition and possible understanding of an allusion. Allusive talk is thus both based on, and points to, a common ground shared by the interlocutors and providing a rich inferential substrate of interaction (Haugh, 2017) that usually remains unexposed.
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As open class repair initiators (OCRIs, e.g., “what” or “huh”) do not specify the type of repairable, choosing an adequate repair format in the next turn becomes a practical problem for the participants. Whereas in monolingual/L1 speaker conversations participants typically orient towards troubles caused by reduced acoustic intelligibility or by topical/sequential disjunction, in multilingual/L2 interactions possible problems regarding asymmetric language choices and skills can be added – and might be responded to accordingly. Based on videotaped international business meetings and interactions at a customs post, this paper investigates various open class and embodied other-initiations of repair. By means of a conversation analytical and multimodal approach to social interaction, this contribution focuses first on instances of audible OCRIs and illustrates that they are accompanied by embodied conduct. Second, two types of embodied other-initiation of repair are scrutinized: a lifted eyebrows/head display and a freeze display in which movements are suspended. The analysis shows that participants treat these as referring either to troubles in hearing (display 1) or to troubles in understanding the linguistic format (display 2). This leads to the formulation of further desiderata and analytical challenges regarding the multimodal other-initiation of repair in general and in professional international settings in particular.
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The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to problematise the overly affiliative interpretations of English as lingua franca (ELF) interactions across all contexts and combinations of people, and demonstrate instances where this is not the case; (2) to explore the role of laughables and laughter in cases where interlocutors orient to and make salient an interdiscursive divergence among them (Scollon and Scollon, 2001). In the data presented here, a divergence in social norms is in one extract made salient as a point of difference among interlocutors, and in two other examples a potential divergence in social norms is treated as if it were the case but not confirmed. These instances are dealt with through laughables and laughter sequences. Sequential analysis of these naturally occurring audio-recorded conversations indicate that participants make salient and orient to what is in their experience deviant from their learned norms and expectations of behaviour without consistently exhibiting affiliative interactional and relational work throughout the interactions. The result of this study has important implications to the way in which ELF interactions can be interpreted and described going forward.

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Sara Merlino is a PhD student of Linguistics at the University of Lyon 2. Working within the framework of Conversation Analysis, she is interested in plurilingual work settings interactions, particularly in the practices of oral translation and interpretation.

Lorenza Mondada is Professor of Linguistics at the Department for Linguistics, University of Lyon 2, and Director of the ICAR research Lab (CNRS). Her research deals with the grammatical and multimodal practices and resources mobilized by participants in interaction. Current research is carried out on video-recordings from various institutional and professional settings (in medical contexts as well as in other workplaces) and on ordinary conversations, focusing on the ways in which participants sequentially and multimodally organize their (often multiple) courses of action. Recent publications include: ‘Working with Video’, Visual Studies 18 (1) (2003) 58–72; ‘Ways of doing: “being plurilingual” in international work meetings’, in: R. Gardner, J. Wagner (Eds.), Second Language Conversations, London, 2004; ‘Multimodal resources for turn-taking: pointing and the emergence of possible next speakers’, Discourse Studies 9 (2) (2007) 195–226; ‘Operating together through videoconference: members’ procedures for accomplishing a common space of action’, in: S. Hester, D. Francis (Eds.), Orders of Ordinary Action. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007, pp. 51–67; ‘Bilingualism and the analysis of talk at work: code-switching as a resource for the organization of action and interaction’, in: M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach, Palgrave, New York, 2007, pp. 297–318.

Florence Oloff has completed her dissertation on overlapping talk in French and German at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon in 2009. She works as a research assistant within the European Research Project “Language Dynamics and Diversity in Europe” (FP6).

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Laughter in professional meetings: The organization of an emergent ethnic joke

Abstract

Section snippets

Journal of Pragmatics

Bilingual Conversation

The pragmatics of code-switching: a sequential approach

Tang's dilemma and other problems: ethnification processes at some multicultural workplaces

Pragmatics

“Lingua franca” negotiations: towards an interactional approach

World Englishes

On formal structures of practical actions

Laughter in Interaction

Laughter as a patient's resource: dealing with delicate aspects of medical interaction

Text

Laughter in medical interaction: from quantification to analysis, and back

Journal of Sociolinguistics

A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement

Culture in Action. Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis

A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/declination

On the organization of laughter in talk about troubles