Conversational joking and epistemics

The first analysis of this study, in Chapter 4, centers on crosslinguistic conversational joking in TV programs. The analysis draws heavily upon studies on humor, epistemics (Heritage &

Raymond 2005; 2011; Stivers, Mondada & Steensig 2011; Heritage 2013) and codeswitching (Siegel 1995; Myers-Scotton 1998; Myers-Scotton & Bolonyai 2001). Prior to the rise of linguistic accounts on humor in 1980s and 1990s, three strands of psychological research were influential. Theories of incongruity (Monro 1951) emphasize the elements of surprise and unexpectedness that reside in the punchline in a joke text. The theories of disparagement (Suls 1972) depict the sense of superiority and hostility when we see others‘ minor misfortune. Last, humor is thought to generate laugher, which in turn frees us from negative emotions. The release theory, as summarized in Monro (1951), with a long history as early as back to Freud, illustrates the lifted emotion caused by humor. According to Raskin (1985), theories of incongruity address the role of stimuli. Theories of disparagement have social-behavioral significance because they focus on the social relations among speakers. The release theory discusses humor from a hearer/audience perspective. The three fields on humor also suggest how complicated it is to theoretically account for humor.

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Linguistic inquiries about humor only came in the limelight in recent decades. One of the well-cited accounts to humor is the Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor by Raskin, who first introduced this theoretical framework in 1979 and later published the influential Semantic Mechanisms of Humor (1985). A script has been broadly defined as a piece of

information regarding ways of doing or understanding (Raskin 1985; Attardo 1994). The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor explains speakers‘ competence on humor, rather

than their performance related to joke-telling (Attardo 1994). A text is considered to be humorous if ―the text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts‖ and if ―the two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special sense‖ (Raskin 1985,

99). The script-based semantic account on humor illustrates that humor is ambiguity-based. A

joke text involves a non-bona-fide communication (Raskin 1985) because speakers breach Grice‘s Cooperative Principle (1975) by offering insufficient or incorrect amount of

information. However, Raskin also outlines that humor seems to work within a set of maxims of its own because speakers and hearers still work cooperatively to tell and to identify jokes.

The observation leads him to propose the cooperative principle for the non-bona-fide communication (see Raskin 1985, 100-104). The success, or harmony, of joke-telling and joke-understanding suggest that humor requires shared knowledge to evoke similar scripts.

The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor, as influential as it is, is suggested by Attardo (1994) to have overlook other non-semantic elements of joke telling. General Theory of

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Verbal Humor, ―the revised version‖ (Attardo 1994, 222) of the Script-based Semantic

Theory of Humor, attempts to fix its limitations (Attardo & Raskin 1991) and elaborates on all humorous text types. Having suggested so, Norrick (2003) still categorizes the General Theory of Verbal Humor as a theoretical account on competence, instead of on performance.

Studies on linguistic humor began with investigation of linguistic competence, a legacy of generative linguistics (Attardo 1994), before conversational joking came to the fore.

Humor in conversation can be further divided into joke telling and conversational joking (Boxer & Cortés-Conde 1997). Joke telling is described to be ―a play frame created by participants, with a backdrop of ingroup knowledge, encompassing not only verbal features but also suprasegmentals and non-verbal communication‖ (Boxer & Corés-Conde 1997, 277).

Conversational joking is identified according to who the target is. Joking targeted at a present

party is labeled as ‗teasing‘ (Boxer & Cortés-Conde 1997). Joking targeted at an absent other,

‗gossiping,‘ enhances ingroup solidarity among present interactants (Jaworski & Coupland

2005). Self-deprecating humor projects a positive image for the speaker (Norrick 1993).

Among these types of joking, teasing is the most risky with regards to face work for it is directed at a present party in interaction (Boxer & Cortés-Conde 1997). Teasing can be achieved through various discursive strategies. For example, Norrick and Bubel (2009) look into the use of direct address terms and find that incongruity can reside in inappropriate use of vocatives, such as jokingly calling a nagging friend ―Mother.‖ Haugh (2010) studies how

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jocular mockery, ―teasing where participants are orienting to fostering solidarity, rapport or affiliation‖ (2107), is interactionally achieved by examining response to a speaker‘s overdone complaints and the speaker‘s further response to the hearer‘s stance. Haugh (2010) states that

jocular mockery, or teasing, is both interpersonally rewarding and risky, a finding in line with Boxer and Cortés-Conde‘s (1997) that teasing either bonds or bites. This is also the case in

the Taiwanese context with conversational joking related to English. Who and what are deployed as the ‗butt‘ of the teasing mirror how knowledge of English is given social

meanings.

Invoking humorous readings relies on ingroup, shared knowledge (Boxer &

Cortés-Conde 1997), including both linguistic knowledge and knowledge in general. How one‘s access to knowledge is presumed shapes interaction. Stivers et al. (2011) identify three dimensions of knowledge management in interaction, with evidence from interlocutors‘

epistemic stances. ‗Epistemic access‘ refers to speakers‘ judgments of addressees‘ knowledge and speakers‘ own speech adjustment to addressees‘ knowledge. When speakers successfully provide addressees with information previously unknown to them, ‗epistemic congruence‘ is

reached. That is, knowledge transmit from the knowing party to the unknowing is the default and thus the most preferred interaction. ‗Epistemic primacy‘ deals with the relative right of

access to knowledge. Speakers who know more than their addressees, speakers who maintain more intimate relationships with the addressees than other interlocutors, and speakers with

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higher authority are more entitled to assert and manage knowledge transmit. In a word, interpersonal distance, interaction roles, and the relative degree of access to knowledge impact on the immediate knowledge-exchange conversation. ‗Epistemic responsibilities,‘ the third dimension, address the obligations to know. Heritage and Raymond (2005; 2011) and Heritage (2013) also attend to the management of knowledge in interaction. Heritage and Raymond (2005; 2011) and Heritage (2013) use K+ and K- to note the relative access to knowledge among interactants. Speakers who inquire about information are in a K- position.

Recipients of a question tend to be in a K+ position because supposedly they possess more knowledge than speakers who ask questions. Interlocutors‘ discursive devices in negotiating epistemic stances to maintain interaction and to secure interpersonal relations highlight the cooperative nature in interaction. Thus, a question elicits an answer, ‗alignment‘ as termed by Stivers (2008), and an assessment expects an agreement, ‗affiliation‘ as Stivers (2008) calls it.

There are numerous possible ways to breach expectations to make epistemic discrepancy a potential source of humor.

Humor in multilingual contexts works distinctively from humor in monolingual contexts. Two research trends are observed. The first trend, which so far has received the most of the academic attention, discusses the role of sufficient multilingual competence in producing and comprehending humorous discourse. In multilingual settings, languages are bestowed separate or even conflicting social values. Code alternation on the basis of different

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values could be a source of humor (Siegel 1995) because code alternation is metaphorical (Appel & Muysken 1987), marked and calculating (Myers-Scotton 1998; Myers-Scotton &

Bolonyai 2001), and indicative of group membership and social distance (Rampton 1995).

Codeswitching serves as a contextual cue (John Gumperz 1982) which helps listeners differentiate what is said from what is really meant. This explains why, with identical propositional contents, codeswitching may create a sense of amusement which its monolingual counterpart may not achieve.

Since competence carries social significances, the absence of it is equally socially implicative and deployable to serve other functions. Competence, or the lack of it, could be the target of humor. J.S.-Y. Park (2003) investigates how English is presented in Korean media and finds that incompetence in English is strategically constructed to be the target of humor. Treating incompetence as a source of humor requires the ideological manifestation of regarding competence as a necessity. Lacking English competence therefore becomes undesired (because it goes against the norm) but expected (because not many people speak fluent English). As a foreign language probably not as widely distributed as the lingua franca in a speech community, English competence can be treated as event knowledge. It does not require native-like proficiency to deploy or comprehend a humorous setting. The type of humor is crosslinguistic in form, but it has to be understood in social contexts where the linguistic resources are not equally distributed. Blommaert states that under globalization

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where linguistic contact is getting frequent, language competence can be seen as resources,

truncated and mobile (Blommaert 2010). Chapter 4 will discuss how knowledge of English and one‘s lack of English knowledge are exploited to generate humorous effect. The

investigation of crosslinguistic humor is therefore three-folded. Linguistically, the study observes how English-related humor is verbally presented to its target audience via multimodal media discourse. Epistemically, the study investigates how knowledge of English is presented. Ideologically, the chapter discusses how both the conversational joking among interactants on the program and multimodal communication between the media and the audience reveals the ideologizing process of English. Remarkably, this chapter discusses how

the deployment serves solidarity functions in media by constructing crosslinguistic conversational joking as a ‗we-code‘.