31.2286, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Sinkeviciute (2019)
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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2286. Thu Jul 16 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 31.2286, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Sinkeviciute (2019)
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Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2020 00:25:38
From: Rashad Ahmed [rashadhse at gmail.com]
Subject: Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-4347.html
AUTHOR: Valeria Sinkeviciute
TITLE: Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness
SUBTITLE: A pragmatic analysis of social interaction
SERIES TITLE: Topics in Humor Research 8
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019
REVIEWER: Rashad Ahmed, Miami University of Ohio
SUMMARY
The book Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness, written by Valeria
Sinkeviviute, was published in 2019 by John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Having experiences in sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies, the author is
well-suited to take on the issue of jocularity within the area of speech acts.
The publication comes in 274 pages and undertakes conversational humor:
humorous practices such as teasing, mockery, frontstage and backstage from a
socio-pragmatic perspective and relates that to politeness/impoliteness in two
cultures – the Australian and the British cultures. Relying on jocular
practices from these two contexts, it touches on a such socio-pragmatic issue,
covering theory and practice of the subject matter. It expounds the minutia
cultural values and how they are perceived differently in the two countries
that speak the same language!
The book, organized in nine chapters, is made up of two parts – the first part
is germane to theory and the second to practice. Chapter 1 provides an
introductory note charting the territories of the publication. Chapters 2, 3,
and 4 lay the theoretical foundation of the topic of humor and (im)politeness
across cultures. Chapter 5 bridges the theoretical part with the subsequent
analytical part. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 display empirical evidence of the issue
in focus, a delineation of the results of empirical analysis of data collected
through interviews, reality TV, and corpora. Chapter 9 is a short concluding
note that summarizes what it is all about and provides venues for further
investigation.
The front matter of the book furnishes an overview of the purpose of the book
and its structure. The author started by giving an example to illustrate the
main idea behind the book. The example is an excerpt from a British TV show
called Big Brother and in this dialogue, the author explained that utterances
cannot be perceived as funny by all the audience, and thus there are more
aspects to be taken into account. The author stated clearly that the purpose
of the book is not to analyze jokes and why they are funny; rather its main
goal is to elucidate the different ways humor is used and how verbal choices
are evaluated.
Following the first introductory chapter, Chapter 2 is a discussion of
different approaches of politeness and impoliteness and follows with a
critique of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model. The author highlights how the
focus of research has shifted from politeness to both politeness and
impoliteness, as supported by Mills (2011), who disputes the idea of
investigating politeness separately from impoliteness, claiming that
“politeness takes its meaning from the potentiality of impoliteness” (p.40).
The author also described the difficulty of coming up with a specific
definition for politeness, and went on to discuss other concepts such as
first-order and second-order, where the former focuses on “personal
experience” and the latter refers to “the scientific conceptualization of
those experiences.” The chapter ends with a summary of the approach the author
has taken in the current study and reiterates the main purposes of this
research.
Chapter 3 discusses the different datasets that the study is based on. The
first type of data is extracted from two corpora: the British National Corpus
and the Australian English Corpus called Ozcorp. The former consists of
100-million word corpus with the majority of it (90%) from texts such as
fiction, newspapers, journals, essays, letters, etc. The latter (Ozcorp)
consists of 25 million words. The second type of data is the TV game show
series Big Brother with its British and Australian versions. The third type is
the qualitative interviews, which were considered complementary to the study.
The author gathered data from 35 participants; 16 native speakers of
Australian English and 19 native speakers of British English.
Chapter 4 is an analysis of the approach of “jocular verbal behaviors”. It
explained what in socio-linguistics is called “face-threatening and
face-supportive verbal acts” (p.88). The chapter elaborates also on relevant
terms such as teasing, jocular mockery and jocular abuse. In addition, the
chapter discusses what happens in teasing and after teasing as well as the
functions of teasing.
Chapter 5 opens on an interesting saying, “A person without a sense of humor
is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road.” The
author in this chapter discusses surveys of various shared cultural ethos that
differ to some extent from culture to culture, with a prime focus on the
British and Australian cultural contexts. The chapter sheds light on various
jocular, cultural values, and interactional preferable practices, providing an
overview of the linkage between jocular verbal behavior and attitude toward
humor as well as laughter, which is present in multiple communicative
situations. Using the reality TV show Big Brother, the author set the scene to
familiarize readers with the context of the study. The study reported that
Australian English speakers seem to value the funniness of laughter more than
British speakers do. The study also concludes that even in cases where public
or personal offences take place, there is still some sort of funniness.
Chapter 6 presents the results of behavioral public and personal interactions
building on Goffman’s (1959) work on self-presentation with relevance to what
Goffman termed frontstage and backstage. Using episodes from the reality TV
shows Big Brother UK 2012 and Big Brother Australia 2012, the author examines
how the participants react to jocular behavior. The findings revealed that the
participants showed different assessment of teasing from frontstage and
backstage.
Chapter 7 examines the negative perceptions of jocular comments using the TV
shows, Big Brother UK 2012 and Big Brother Australia 2012. The author used
participants’ self-evaluation to analyze all of the examples to find out what
triggers such perceptions. The reasons mentioned included the entertainment of
a third party at the expense of the target and making consecutive jokes or
what one of the participants referred to as taking things too far. Other
reasons were related to individual matters, disrupting societal accord, and
the topic itself.
Chapter 8, which is the biggest of all other chapters, has three main parts.
Based on qualitative data drawn from the interviews, the first part discusses
meta-pragmatics in relation to interactive jocularity, the second evaluates
the instigators’ comments and reaction as well as the interviewer’s feelings
and attitude, and the third undertakes inter- and intra- cultural evaluation
of a jocular remark. It generally exhibits how one is expected to behave-- in
the given contexts-- when one is being a target of a jocular comment. The
qualitative data of the meta-pragmatic comments is presented in this chapter
with ample illustrations. The chapter investigates how language users evaluate
jocular interactional practice -=the relationship between meta-pragmatics and
interactive jocularity. The discussion centers on two main categories: how the
interviewees perceived both jocular and offensive behaviors, and how they
assessed the jocular face-threatening verbal acts in the game show Big
Brother.
Chapter 9 concludes the volume with a summary of the findings and highlights
its contribution to the field of conversational humor and (im)politeness. One
of the major contributions, according to the author, is using multiple
datasets in two contexts: the Australian and the British. Towards the closure
of the book, the author provides some insightful ideas for further research,
such as examining the difference between written texts (corpus-based) and
interactional patterns in the Big Brother TV show.
EVALUATION
“Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness” is, concisely, a meta-pragmatically
oriented corpus-based study, providing a broad analysis of verbal practices in
relation to (im)politeness in the Australian and British contexts. The book,
which is in essence a modified version of a Ph.D. dissertation on
socio-pragmatism, was probably meant for those who have passion for
understanding humor and their implications in socio-cultural contexts. In this
scholarly book, which is a great addition to the field, the author exhibits
stamina, academic style, depth and breadth of her knowledge of the
subject-matter of the publication as well as uniformity of analysis and
argument from start to the finish. The overall theme of the book is an
enrichment of our understanding of language use in actual conversations – one
of the most complicated areas of research (Dawson & Phelan, 2016). It greatly
contributes to the areas of conversational humor and (Im)politeness,
cross-cultural, intercultural, and intra-cultural linguistic jocular verbal
behavior. It discusses the similarities and dissimilarities of interactional
practices of Australians and Britishers. Results are garnered from an enormous
dataset collected from triangulated sources, making the study more valid and
reliable.
Nevertheless, the book – like many other publications – is not devoid of
limitations. At the outset, it has been written within the boundaries of
socio-pragmatics. As it was primarily meant for an academic degree, it appears
more interesting for a small audience of researchers and experts in the field.
What is more, while the evidence is based on current data collected from
various sources, it is not clear whether the phenomenon is everlasting or is
likely to change with the passage of time, given the worldwide cultural
exchange under the auspices of modern social networking technologies and
globalization. Moreover, although the book covers major elements of the topic
in a balanced fashion, it would be important for future studies to incorporate
examples from other cultures to highlight the topic in a wider community and
increase its audience and readability.
Despite these limitations, the author managed to provide a thorough account of
how people of different cultures perceive, interpret and react to humorous
discourse. The volume covers a wide range of relevant issues that may ring a
bell for other researchers in the field to further investigate building on its
invaluable findings. The book is highly recommended as a resource to
departments that include pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies in their
programs. It is useful for those who seek elaborative writing on humor and
its interpretation across cultures. The book also has a rich reference list of
numerous related studies, which are worthwhile to read on the topic.
REFERENCES
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language
usage. Cambridge:
CUP. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085
Dawson, H & Phelan, M. (Eds.) (2016). Language Files: Materials for an
introduction to language and linguistics (12th ed). Ohio: Ohio State
University Press.
Goffman, E. (1995). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books.
Mills, S. (2011). Discursive approaches to politeness and impoliteness. In
Linguistic Politeness
Research Group (Eds.), Discursive approaches to politeness (pp. 19–56). Berlin
and Boston:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Rashad Ahmed is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics/TESOL at Miami
University, Ohio. His research interests involve Sociolinguitics, Computer
Assisted Language Learning (CALL), Language Assessment, Digital Literacy,
TESOL Methods, and First-year Composition.
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