How do French humorists adapt across situations?

Abstract

The paradigm of humor studies has deemed prosody (rhythm and intonation) and (dis)fluencies (discourse markers, filled and unfilled pauses, repetitions, etc.) as relevant cues in conversational humor for expression of sarcasm and irony. However, they also make valuable (interactive) devices for discourse planning and structure since they carry both semantic and pragmatic information. After a summary on the study of humorists’ speech and its meta-pragmatic implications (Sections 1 & 2), a two-fold corpus-based analysis offers results on 8 humorists’ speech variations across 4 situations (theatre and radio sketches, radio and face-to-face interviews) and their relevant contextual features. Firstly on the continuum from hypo- to hyper-articulation (Lindblom, 1990), temporal and melodic variations reveal which discourse adaptation is motivated by a specific pragmatic determiner. Secondly, (dis)fluencies’ distribution within speakers and across situations reveal the importance of the individual’s Speaker Dis/Fluency Profile (SDFP). Discussion shall focus on the study’s contribution to humorists’ phonostyles and persona, as well as on the implication of native language SDFP for assessment of non-native speakers.

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