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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1283

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Laughter and stance in social research interviews

Authors: Myers, Greg; Lampropoulou, Sofia
Submitted by: Myers, Greg (Lancaster University, United Kingdom)

Stance-taking has been studied in terms of lexical markers (e.g., Biber 1999), discourse features such as reported speech (e.g. Clift 2006), choice of language or language variety (e.g. Jaffe 2009), and non-verbal actions (e.g. Goodwin 2007).  In this paper we consider a paralinguistic feature, laughter, and the way it relates to stance utterances (using the definition of DuBois 2007).  Laughter is a complex communicative event, not always associated with humorous remarks, and not always an involuntary response.  It is cued, shaped, and responded to as a turn in interaction (Glenn 2003).  We consider laughter in 10 interview projects drawn from ESDS Qualidata, a publicly available archive of UK social research interview transcripts.  First, taking a corpus approach, we use the existing transcriptions, consider all the places the transcriber has indicated laughter, and compare the distribution of these events in different interviews and the kinds of questions in which it is prompted.  Then we do a more detailed analysis of some retranscribed passages where we have sound files, looking especially at how it relates to the interviewer’s elicitation of stance, and how the interviewer responds in the next turn.  Laughter can be used to weaken stance-taking but also to strengthen it;  it can be used to deal with rhetorical dilemmas posed by the questions, and to resist or acknowledge the constraints of a question (Stivers and Hiyashi 2010).  The findings are relevant both for discourse analysis of laughter in interaction and for qualitative social science researchers, including sociolinguists, who use interviews as a source of data.

References:

Biber D. (1999) The grammatical marking of stance. In: Biber D, Johansson S, Leech G, et al. (eds) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman, 965-986.

Clift R. (2006) Indexing stance: reported speech as an interactional evidential. Journal of Sociolinguistcs 10: 569-595.

DuBois J. (2007) The stance triangle. In: Englebretson R (ed) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Glenn P. (2003) Laughter in Interaction.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin C. (2007) Participation, stance and affect in the organisation of activities. Discourse & Society 18: 53-73.

Jaffe A. (2009) Stance:  Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stivers T and Hayashi M. (2010) Transformative answers:  one way to resist a question's constraints. Language in Society 39: 1-25.