28.3259, Review: Pragmatics: Ruiz-Gurillo (2016)

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Subject: 28.3259, Review: Pragmatics: Ruiz-Gurillo (2016)

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Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2017 14:34:40
From: Villy Tsakona [villytsa at otenet.gr]
Subject: Metapragmatics of Humor

 
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EDITOR: Leonor  Ruiz-Gurillo
TITLE: Metapragmatics of Humor
SUBTITLE: Current research trends
SERIES TITLE: IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 14
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Villy Tsakona, Democritus University of Thrace

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The aim of “Metapragmatics of humor: Current research trends,” edited by
Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo, is to investigate humor “as a metapragmatic ability” and
“as a reflexive ability of language” (p. 1). Its content is divided into three
parts: the first one (Chapters 2-5) includes articles attempting to connect
the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH, Attardo 2001) to metapragmatic
awareness; the second one (Chapters 6-12) explores speakers’ metapragmatic
awareness as manifested in different genres (e.g. canned jokes, face-to-face
interactions, stand-up comedy, satirical performances); and the third one
(Chapters 13-14) concerns the development of metapragmatic awareness in
children. 

The introduction of the volume offers a brief theoretical discussion of
previous studies on metapragmatics and metapragmatic awareness, as well as an
outline of the contents of the volume. Those interested in metapragmatics in
general will definitely find useful the extensive list of references, since
they cover a variety of approaches to metapragmatics. 

The first part of the volume begins with Laura Alba-Juez’s chapter on “The
variables of the evaluative functional relationship: The case of humorous
discourse”. The author underlines the importance of evaluation for producing
and interpreting humor: “[h]umorous discourse […] always contains an
underlying stance (on the part of the interlocutors), manifested through the
use of evaluative language/discourse, gestures, prosody, laughter, or images”
(p. 31). Her proposal exploits previous research on evaluation to determine
six variables to be used for accounting for evaluation in jokes. Although
these parameters are exemplified in several jokes, the analysis is restricted
to textual evaluation and does not expand to evaluative reactions to jokes (p.
21), which would bring the discussion even closer to the metapragmatics of
humor. Moreover, evaluation is proposed as an additional knowledge resource
for the analysis of humor in GTVH terms (Attardo 2001). The author is right in
pointing out that evaluation is strongly related to two already existing
knowledge resources, namely the Narrative Strategy and the Language ones,
since evaluation is indeed genre-dependent and does affect the verbal encoding
of the humorous text. However, she does not relate evaluation to two other
knowledge resources: the Target (i.e. the object of evaluation, what is
ridiculed or criticized through humor), and the Script Opposition, which
encodes why an action, idea, etc. is assessed as abnormal, unexpected, and/or
unconventional. These two knowledge resources are crucial for determining
what, why, and how something is evaluated as funny/humorous.

The chapter by Ana Pano Alamán and Ana Mancera Rueda, “Humor and advertising
in Twitter: An approach from the General Theory of Verbal Humor and
metapragmatics”, is based on a corpus of humorous tweets posted by Spanish
companies or public institutions to create and maintain their bonds with the
wider audience, to enhance their public profiles, and sometimes even to
appease customers’ complaints. The authors claim that metapragmatic
competence/awareness plays a significant role in both the production and
comprehension of such humorous tweets. They see metapragmatic
competence/awareness as knowing how linguistic elements (are expected to) work
in specific communicative settings. Such knowledge guides speakers’ choices
concerning their own linguistic production and their evaluation of that of
others’ (p. 37). Therefore, metapragmatic competence/awareness allows readers
to identify humor by tracing incongruous situations or actions, style clashes,
double voices and meanings, etc. In this context, they analyze a large number
of examples shedding light on different aspects of such humor and showing how
humor is used “as a promotional and an advertising strategy, in order to
consolidate the brand and the institution images and to increase the number of
their followers in the microblog” (p. 52).

Marta Agüero Guerra’s aim in her article “Beyond verbal incongruity: A
genre-specific model for the interpretation of humor in political cartoons” is
to offer a comprehensive genre-specific model for the analysis of cartoons.
She thus begins with an extensive discussion of previous research on social
semiotics, comic studies, intersemiosis as well as of linguistic and, in
particular, cognitive approaches to humor. The author is right in pointing out
that, among humor scholars and within humor theories, the visual elements of
cartoons and their contribution to meaning-making and meaning-comprehension
have often been underestimated. Hence, she attempts to bring to the surface
all those aspects of visual semiotics and visual literacy that could help us
account for cartoon humor. An analytical model of five phases is proposed and
applied for the analysis of two Spanish cartoons referring to the current
financial crisis in Spain. Initially the model seems simple, but, as it
incorporates all the above-mentioned theoretical frameworks and respective
terminology, its application turns out to be quite complex and perhaps
difficult to follow.

The main goal of Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo’s “Metapragmatics of humor: Variability,
negotiability and adaptability in humorous monologues” is to demonstrate how
the GTVH (Attardo 2001) could be perceived as a theory reflecting the
metapragmatic abilities and awareness of both humorists and their audience.
She thus attempts to explain the different phases the producers and recipients
of a humorous text go through when processing it. More specifically,
Ruiz-Gurillo exploits Verschueren’s (1999) approach, according to which
variability (i.e. the range of linguistic choices available), negotiability
(i.e. the flexible principles and strategies used to make specific linguistic
choices), and adaptability (i.e. the negotiable choices made to achieve
specific communicative needs) are key notions to describe metapragmatic
activities. The author claims that variability, negotiability, and
adaptability could be matched to the knowledge resources proposed within the
GTVH. The resulting analytical model is applied to extracts from humorous
monologues by a Spanish comedian, Andreu Buenafuente.

Miguel Ángel Campos’ study on “Lawyers, great lawyers, and liars: The
metapragmatics of lying in lawyer jokes” opens the second part of the volume
and concentrates on a specific cycle of canned jokes, that is, lawyer jokes,
which have become popular during the past few decades, especially in the USA.
Such jokes are based on, and reproduce, negative stereotypes concerning, among
other things, lawyers’ immoral behavior, untrustworthiness, and tendency to
lie – the latter being the focus of the study. After considering that both
humor and lying have been analyzed from a pragmatic perspective, the author
exemplifies how lawyer jokes represent lawyers violating Grice’s (1975) maxims
of quantity, quality, and manner. Campos concludes that lawyer jokes
constitute “a metapragmatic event” (p. 121) as they exhibit specific thematic
and structural properties which render them recognizable, accepted, effective
in causing laughter, and eventually predictable (pp. 121-122): “[t]he
participants (the joke-teller and the audience) are clearly aware of the type
of discourse involved, of the rules it is governed by, and the underlying
ideology, but such metapragmatic awareness is precisely one of the most
powerful mechanisms supporting this type of humor” (p. 122).

Isabel Balteiro’s study entitled “A look at metalinguistic jokes based on
intentional morphological reanalysis” pertains to jokes that play with
linguistic conventions and, more specifically, with word or morpheme
boundaries to create a humorous effect. Based on a small corpus of English
riddle-jokes, the author examines the intentional morphological reanalyses
performed to produce this kind of humor, and demonstrates how its
interpretation presupposes a proficient knowledge of the English language, as
well as shared sociocultural knowledge between the humorist and the
recipients. The analysis of her corpus reveals that the playful manipulation
of word or morpheme boundaries may result in the creation of pseudo-morphemes,
in folk etymologies, or even in new words. Spelling conventions (e.g.
capitalization) or dashes are exploited to mark the manipulation and hence the
humorous intention of such jokes. This is why, she observes, such
metalinguistic humor works better in written discourse; in oral discourse “the
speaker may probably compensate for this [lack of visual cues] by playing with
stress, pauses or by varying the length of the vowel at the time of speaking
or telling the joke” (p. 137).

In “How do French humorists adapt across situations? A corpus study of their
prosodic and (dis)fluency profiles”, Iulia Grosman examines a wide variety of
prosodic features (pauses, speech rate, articulation rate, pitch rate,
glissando, pitch rises and falls, melodic agitation, accents/stress) and
(dis)fluency markers (filled/unfilled pauses, discourse markers, false starts,
truncation, repetitions, substitutions, insertions) in four contexts where
professional comedians deliver their performances and develop their personae:
standup comedy shows, face-to-face interactions, radio shows, and radio
interviews. The findings of this study show that, on the one hand, there are
statistically significant differences in the use of prosodic features and
(dis)fluency markers across the genres examined, and on the other that each
comedian exhibits a distinct phonostyle across genres. Her elaborate prosodic
analysis, however, seems incomplete as all the features investigated are
isolated from their co-text, that is, from the surrounding discourse. Given
that comedians’ humorous discourse does not solely consist of humorous
utterances but also of serious ones (see serious relief in Attardo 2001), it
would be interesting to investigate whether all these prosodic features are
included in humorous or serious utterances of comedians’ performances.

Craig O. Stewart’s chapter on “Truthiness and consequences: A cognitive
pragmatic analysis of Stephen Colbert’s satirical strategies and effects”
highlights the importance of uptake when investigating the metapragmatics of
humor. The ways recipients perceive a text intended as humorous or, in the
present case, as satirical could provide us with valuable information
concerning their metapragmatic awareness (Verschueren 2000), namely the
processes through which they reach or do not reach a specific interpretation
of the text. Stewart uses Simpson’s (2003) model of satire, Bell’s (1991)
theory of audience and referee design, and Booth’s (1974) work on irony to
account for the different reception of two satirical performances delivered by
the same comedian in front of different audiences and in difference contexts.
He convincingly explains the reasons why one of these performances was not
perceived as satirical by all of its viewers, while the other turned out to be
a most successful one. His analysis connects the phases Simpson identifies in
satirical communication with the concept of ‘metapragmatic awareness’ and
simultaneously accounts for an important aspect of the metapragmatics of
humor, namely its failure or backfiring, thus discussing “the power and the
pitfalls of ironic satire as political discourse” (p. 187).

In her chapter on “Variability, adaptability and negotiability in
conversational humor: A matter of gender”, M. Belén Alvarado-Ortega explores
how men and women construct gender identities via humor in same-gender
everyday interactions. Like Ruiz-Gurillo (see above), Alvarado-Ortega builds
her argumentation and analysis on the concepts of variability, negotiability,
and adaptability (Verschueren 1999): “the variability of resources that
speakers have at their disposal is linked to the recognition and understanding
of their interlocutor’s utterance; negotiability has to do with appreciating
the humorous utterance; and adaptability refers to the humorous agreement
adopted by the interlocutors” (p. 211). Through a qualitative and a
quantitative analysis of her data from Spanish, the author claims that men and
women exhibit different preferences when it comes to constructing and
negotiating humorous discourse: “whereas women try to adapt their message to
the humorous mode when humor appears seeking to strengthen their ties with the
conversational group, men decide to negotiate their message and leave the
humorous utterance as a way to safeguard their public image, sometimes
threatened by other participants in the conversational exchange” (p. 210).

In her article entitled “Teasing in casual conversations: An opportunistic
discursive strategy”, Béatrice Priego-Valverde explores the interactional
dynamics of linguistic pinning, namely a kind of teasing consisting “of
repeating what has been said by one of the participants in order to initiate a
humorous sequence” (p. 215). In her theoretical discussion, Priego-Valverde
compares linguistic pinning to two other mechanisms for the creation of
conversational humor, namely repetition and punning, to highlight their
similarities and differences. The data examined comes from French interactions
among peers in informal settings and its analysis reveals that linguistic
pinning is employed by participants either to point out a (real or pretended)
linguistic inappropriateness of the previous speaker, or to bring to the
surface a second meaning of his/her words which was not the intended one. Via
a thorough analysis of her data, the author demonstrates how interactants
negotiate the construction of humor based on linguistic pinning, and remarks
that this cannot be achieved without all participants’ agreement and consent
to enter the play frame proposed by the one who initiates the linguistic
pinning. Such acceptance and consent depend on the face needs of each
participant.

Elisa Gironzetti, Salvatore Attardo, and Lucy Pickering investigate the role
of smiling in face-to-face interactions containing humor. Their chapter
entitled “Smiling, gaze, and humor in conversation: A pilot study” reports on
a pilot study using eye-trackers to record “whether participants pay more
attention to smiling facial areas (the mouth and the eyes) when humor is
present than when there is no humor” and “if and how mutual gaze and eye
contact behavior are influenced by the presence of humor in conversation” (p.
240). The methodology adopted combines social eye-tracking and discourse
analysis: participants’ gaze patterns and smiling behavior are correlated to
their production of humorous or non-humorous discourse in the form of jab
lines, punch lines, and irony. The authors also take into consideration
participants’ metapragmatic comments concerning the presence (or absence) of
humor (e.g. ‘that was funny’). The findings of the pilot study suggest that
when humorous discourse is produced, participants seem to pay more attention
to each other’s facial areas involved in smiling as well as to display a
higher smiling intensity. This means that participants observe each other’s
faces to trace smiling behavior and this helps them identify their
interlocutor’s humorous intention and framing of discourse. It is therefore
empirically confirmed that smiling is indeed employed as a metapragmatic
marker of humor in face-to-face interactions. 

The third part of the volume is dedicated to the development of metapragmatic
awareness in children. Elena Hoicka contributes to this discussion from a
developmental psychology perspective. In her chapter “Understanding of
humorous intentions: A developmental approach”, she presents findings from
previous research suggesting that children’s humor appreciation develops
gradually since the first year of their life, while from the age of 4 onwards
they can even detect and appreciate humorous incongruities and their
resolutions. Similarly, humor production comes as early as 8 months old, but
it takes a bit longer, that is, in month 25, for children to become capable of
understanding their interlocutor’s humorous intention. Parents seem to play a
significant role in this process as they exploit smiling, laughter, and
prosodic or verbal cues to help children distinguish between humorous and
non-humorous acts. Furthermore, it is also reported that research has provided
some answers concerning children’s ability to distinguish between humor and
lying and between humor and pretence. The author concludes by observing that
there seem to be important differences in all such skills between children
with typical development and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Down’s
Syndrome.

Finally, in her chapter entitled “Children using phraseology for humorous
purposes: The case of 9-to-10-year-olds”, Larissa Timofeeva-Timofeev reports
of a study on the use of phraseology (e.g. idioms, collocations, discursive
formulas, phrasal compounds) in written fictional narratives produced by 9-10
year-old children. Her study is based on the premise that children’s
phraseological use and skills are directly related to their metapragmatic
awareness. Among the findings presented in the chapter, those closest to humor
research pertain to children’s manipulation of phraseology to produce humorous
effects. In particular, children of 9-10 years old seem to be able to play
with formulaic expressions and create new compound words as part of their
intention to create humor. This, the author suggests, is indicative of their
metapragmatic awareness as it “provide[s] evidence of the reflective
consciousness” on which language use is based (p. 275) or “rests on a
reflective monitoring of discourse” (p. 292). Moreover, some gender
differences emerge from the quantitative analysis of the data: “girls showed
better skills in the utilization of manipulated phraseology, which again
reinforces our perception about their higher level of reflexive control over
discourse” (p. 295).

EVALUATION

One of the main assumptions underlying a significant part of humor research
since the 1960s is that texts intended as humorous are more often than not
perceived (or could be perceived) as such by everyone. Gradually, it started
becoming evident that significant sociocultural differences can be attested in
humor production and comprehension resulting in contrasting interpretations of
the same humorous text, misunderstandings in humorous communication, or even
failed humor. Hence, humor researchers started to focus on how such
differences are encoded in discourse, for example, through contextualization
cues or, most importantly, explicit statements on what is considered as
humorous or not (see among others Canestrari 2010, Kramer 2011, Laineste 2011,
Stewart 2013, Tsakona 2013, 2015, Bell 2015). 

It is exactly in this context that the metapragmatics of humor has become a
burgeoning field within humor research attracting the interest of an
increasing number of scholars. The emphasis has so far been placed mostly on
how the audience (re)contextualizes and responds to humorous texts, showing
their alignment with, or disassociation from, their content and targets. In
other words, the debate on the metapragmatics of humor has opened via bringing
to the surface what was previously more or less ignored or taken for granted:
audience reactions. Needless to say, such developments run in parallel with
similar ones in other areas of metapragmatic research (e.g. see Agha 2007 on
register and Kádár & Haugh 2013 on politeness).

In this sense, the volume under review is a most welcome addition to the
relevant research. Not only does it acknowledge the significance of respective
research topics, but it also enriches the literature and expands its scope by
exploring topics such as speakers’ metapragmatic awareness/competence enabling
them to detect others’ humorous intentions and to convey their own; the use of
prosody, (dis)fluency markers, and facial expressions as metapragmatic markers
of humor; and humorists’ metalinguistic/metapragmatic ability to manipulate
linguistic/pragmatic conventions (see also Zirker & Winter-Froemel 2015).

Given the above, one would expect that the introduction to the volume would
provide an overview of existing studies on the metapragmatics of humor and
would explore the relationship between the chapters and previous research
questions and findings. However, the theoretical discussion is only two pages
long and may leave readers wondering which of the various definitions of
metapragmatics provided cover/s, or is/are closer to, the studies included in
the volume; if and how the diverse approaches proposed could form a coherent
theoretical schema/proposal concerning the metapragmatics of humor; and
eventually how the volume contributes to the recent expansion of theoretical
discussions on metapragmatics (whether of humor or more generally).
Furthermore, the literature review included in the introduction is at points
too dense, thus rendering the comprehension of the relevant concepts and
findings a rather demanding task for the not-so-initiated reader.

Undoubtedly, the volume offers insightful ideas and perspectives to those
interested in the metapragmatics of humor. However, in some chapters, it is
not always clear why the proposed analyses are considered metapragmatic and
not merely pragmatic, or why their findings pertain to the metapragmatics of
humor, and not to its pragmatics. Important questions are thus raised – for
example, what kind of data and what methodological and analytical tools are
suitable for investigating speakers’ metapragmatic awareness and positionings
concerning what humor is and how it is (to be) constructed and used? Answering
such questions will help us to distinguish more clearly between pragmatic and
metapragmatic approaches to humorous discourse. Timofeeva-Timofeev points out
that “[m]etapragmatic awareness is […] formulated with regard to such a
discursive ‘monitoring’ based on the speakers’ ability to explicitly reflect
on their message” (p. 274). In my view, the focus should be placed on the
phrase ‘explicitly reflect’. Future research could concentrate more on
specific kinds of utterances and markers which demonstrate producers’ and
recipients’ ‘explicit reflection’ on the processing of humorous discourse, and
will not merely allow us to infer it via, e.g., detecting interlocutors’
pragmatic intentions, which is, in any case, extremely difficult if at all
possible. Otherwise, pragmatic and metapragmatic approaches to humor will
unnecessarily overlap at the expense of the latter. 

Despite the above reservations, the volume is recommended not only to those
interested in the metapragmatics (and the pragmatics) of humorous discourse
but also to those interested in the metapragmatics of language in general. As
it sheds light on different aspects of the metapragmatics of humor, it
contributes to the recent discussion on the topic and, hopefully, paves the
way for more relevant research to come.

REFERENCES

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Attardo, Salvatore. 2001. Humorous texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bell, Alan. 1991. The language of news media. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Bell, Nancy. 2015. We are not amused: Failed humor in interaction. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.

Booth, Wayne C. 1974. A rhetoric of irony. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Canestrari, Carla. 2010. Meta-communicative signals and humorous verbal
interchanges: A case study. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
23(3). 327-349.

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan
(eds.), Syntax and semantics. Volume 3. Speech Acts, 41-58. New York: Academic
Press.

Kádár, Dániel Z. & Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding politeness. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 

Kramer, Elise. 2011. The playful is political: The metapragmatics of internet
rape-joke arguments. Language in Society 40(2). 137-168.

Laineste, Liisi. 2011. Politics of taste in a post-Socialist state: A case
study. In Villy Tsakona & Diana Elena Popa (eds.), Studies in political humor:
In between political critique and public entertainment, 217-241. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.

Simpson, Paul. 2003. On the discourse of satire: Toward a stylistic model of
satirical humor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Stewart, Craig O. 2013. Strategies of verbal irony in visual satire: Reading
The New Yorker’s “Politics of Fear” cover. Humor: International Journal of
Humor Research 26(2). 197-217.

Tsakona, Villy. 2013. Okras and the metapragmatic stereotypes of humor:
Towards an expansion of the GTVH. In Marta Dynel (ed.), Developments in
linguistic humor theory, 25-48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Tsakona, Villy. 2015. “The doctor said I suffer from vitamin € deficiency”:
Investigating the multiple social functions of Greek crisis jokes. Pragmatics
25(2). 287-313.

Verschueren, Jef. 1999. Understanding pragmatics. London: Arnold.

Verschueren, Jef. 2000. Notes on the role of metapragmatic awareness in
language use. Pragmatics 10(4). 439-456.

Zirker, Angelika & Esme Winter-Froemel (eds.). 2015. Wordplay and
metalinguistic/metadiscursive reflection: Authors, contexts, techniques, and
meta-reflection. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Villy Tsakona is Assistant Professor of Sociolinguistics and Discourse
Analysis in the Department of Education Sciences in Early Childhood,
Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. Her research interests include humor
research, narrative, political and media discourse analysis, as well literacy
theories and applications. She has co-edited Studies in Political Humor: In
between Political Critique and Public Entertainment with Diana Popa
(Benjamins, 2011), co-authored The Narrative Construction of Identities in
Critical Education with Argiris Archakis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and
authored The Sociolinguistics of Humor: Theory, Functions, and Teaching
(Grigoris Publications 2013; in Greek). Personal webpage:
http://www.concept-pl.us/villy.tsakona





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