• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 477

Part of Session 115: Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (Other abstracts in this session)

Laughter as emotional display in a multilingual setting of post-soviet development

Authors: Muratbayeva, Bakyt
Submitted by: Muratbayeva, Bakyt (Universität Bielefeld, Germany)

In various studies on emotions and on laughter, in particular in psychological works, there is a dominant perspective on these two phenomena. Emotions are often seen as a reaction on external stimuli and its expression displays an internal state. In a similar way laughter is often treated as a passive reaction on external stimuli, for instance, as a response to humour.

In contrast to this widely spread idea, I see laugher as an important social communicative every day activity. It is not only an answer to various external stimuli such as jokes, but it makes joking, marks it or, to say it in the language of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, laughter does jokes or other social phenomena. Laughter plays an important role in the creation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. It creates interactional identities. It can be seen as a social tool in the process of boundary making within or between groups (Glenn 2003).  For example, laughter as laughing at serves not only to belittle others but also to create others. With this notion of laugher I want to emphasis its social and active role in social interactions. Concretely, I see laughter as something active and social that plays an important role in communicating social meanings.

My contribution to this thematic session on the “Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction” will be a detailed description of some multilingual situations where laughter occurs. The paper is based on my master thesis about laughter in everyday interactions of the Kazakhstani development milieu.

Concerning my methodology, as it is preferred in ethnomethodological conversation analysis, I did audio and video recordings of naturally occurring interactions. In the study of laugher, I undermine the importance of such “natural data” that was not provoked by the scholar. Laughter is an everyday phenomenon which is relatively easy and accessible to observe. Besides, one cannot take it out of its original context and simply ask questions about it post facto. Laughter is orderly organised together with other social verbal and nonverbal social activities. All these aspects belong to the study of laughter and are integral parts of it, which demand detailed description.

As an example of a multilingual setting I use everyday interactions within the Kazakhstani development milieu. Development cooperation can be seen as a sphere where multilingual interactions are concentrated. This is especially the case in post-socialist Kazakhstan. Local employees and foreign ones often demonstrate an outstanding willingness to learn and speak foreign languages. Local employees often learn English, while foreign ones learn Russian and Kazakh. Compared to people in other milieus, they are often forced to communicate with cultural others. Therefore, such people are often confronted with intercultural multilingual situations, where specific problems of communication often appear. A detailed study of laughter as a special type of emotional display in such situations provides an interesting and alternative view on how such multilingual and intercultural communication works in the daily life of the post-soviet development milieu.