In:Handbook of Pragmatics: 25th Annual Installment
Edited by Frank Brisard, Sigurd D’hondt, Pedro Gras and Mieke Vandenbroucke
[Handbook of Pragmatics 25] 2022
► pp. 156–176
Teasing
Published online: 18 November 2022
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.25.tea1
https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.25.tea1
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Definitions, related practices and terms
- 3.Production of teasing
- 4.Functions
- 5.Response to teasing
- 6.The metapragmatics of teasing
- 7.Teasing and (im)politeness
- 8.Teasing and identity construction
- 9.Future directions
Acknowledgements Notes References
References (96)
Attardo, Salvatore. 2020. “Humor.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 155–181. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bell, Nancy D. 2007. “How native and non-native English speakers adapt to humor in intercultural interaction.” Humor 20 (1): 27–48.
Bi, Xiaoyi, and Elizabeth Marsden. 2020. “Managing interpersonal relationships: Teasing as a method of professional identity construction.” Journal of Pragmatics 165: 18–30.
Birolini, Christophe. 2022. “‘Some people work at bit more than me, and so we tease them’: The production of an elite student community in an elite French higher education institution.” Humor 35 (1): 5–30.
Boxer, Diana, and Florencia Cortés-Conde. 1997. “From bonding and biting: Conversational joking and identity display.” Journal of Pragmatics 27: 275–295.
Brône, Geert. 2008. “Hyper- and misunderstanding in interactional humor.” Journal of Pragmatics 40 (12): 2027–2061.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buttny, Richard. 2001. “Therapeutic humor in retelling the clients’ tellings.” Text 21 (3): 303–326.
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, and Michael Haugh. 2020. “The metapragmatics of ‘teasing’ in Taiwanese Chinese conversational humour.” The European Journal of Humour Research 8 (4): 7–30.
. 2021. “Teasing and claims to non-serious intent in Chinese talk shows.” East Asian Pragmatics 6 (2): 135–159.
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, Michael Haugh, and Hsi-Yao Su. (2021). “Taking it too far: the role of ideological discourses in contesting the limits of teasing and offence.” Pragmatics 31 (3): 382–405.
Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, and Valeria Sinkeviciute. (2022). “The role of ‘familiarity’ in Mandarin Chinese speakers’ metapragmatic evaluations of Australian conversational humour.” The European Journal of Humour Research 10 (2): 74–95.
Choi, Seongsook, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2016. “Enacting and negotiating power relations through teasing in distributed leadership constellations.” Pragmatics and Society 7 (3): 482–502.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2013. “Impoliteness.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Michael Haugh, and Valeria Sinkeviciute. 2017. “(Im)politeness and mixed messages.” In Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 323–355. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deppermann, Arnulf, and Michael Haugh. 2022. Action Ascription in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dynel, Marta. 2008. “No aggression, only teasing: The pragmatics of teasing and banter.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 4 (2): 241–261.
. 2009. “Beyond a joke: Types of conversational humour.” Language and Linguistics Compass. Semantics and Pragmatics 3: 1284–1299.
. 2011. “Joker in the pack: Towards determining the status of humorous framing in conversations.” In The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains, ed. by Marta Dynel, 217–241. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2013. “Impoliteness as disaffiliative humour in film talk.” In Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory, ed. by Marta Dynel, 105–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2016. “Conceptualizing conversational humour as (im)politeness: The case of film talk.” Journal of Politeness Research 12 (1): 117–147.
Eisenberg, Ann. R. 1986. “Teasing: Verbal play in two Mexicano homes.” In Language Socialization Across Cultures: Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, ed. by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 182–198. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Espelage, Dorothy L., and Christine S. Asidao. 2001. “Conversations with middle school students about bullying and victimization.” Journal of Emotional Abuse 2 (2–3): 49–62.
Feyaerts, Kurt, Geert Brône, and Robin De Ceukelaire. 2015. “The art of teasing: A corpus study of teasing sequences in American sitcoms between 1990 and 1999.” In Cognitive Linguistics and Humor Research, ed. by Geert Brône, Kurt Feyaerts and Tony Veale, 215–242. Berlin: De Gruyter.
File, Kieran, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2019. “That match was ‘a bit like losing your virginity’. Failed humour, face and identity construction in TV interviews with professional athletes and coaches.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 132–144.
Geyer, Naomi. 2010. “Teasing and ambivalent face in Japanese multi-party discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 2120–2130.
Glenn, Phillip, and Elizabeth Holt. 2015. “Laughter.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goddard, Cliff. 2018. “‘Joking, kidding, teasing’: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor.” Intercultural Pragmatics 15 (4): 487–514.
Gong, Lili, and Yongping Ran. 2020. “Discursive constraints of teasing: Constructing professionality via teasing in Chinese entertainment interviews.” Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics 43 (1): 64–82.
Gradin Franzén, Anna, and Karin Aronsson. 2013. “Teasing, laughing and disciplinary humor: Staff–youth interaction in detention home treatment.” Discourse Studies 15 (2): 167–183.
Habib, Rania. 2008. “Humor and disagreement: Identity construction and cross-cultural enrichment.” Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1117–1145.
Haddington, Pentti. 2011. “Serious or non-serious? Sequential ambiguity and disavowing a prior stance.” Functions of Language 18: 149–182.
Haugh, Michael. 2010. “Jocular mockery, (dis)affiliation, and face.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (8): 2106–2119.
. 2011. “Humour, face and im/politeness in getting acquainted.” In Situated Politeness, ed. by Bethan L. Davies, Michael Haugh and Andrew John Merrison, 165–184. London and New York: Continuum.
. 2014. “Jocular mockery as interactional practice in everyday Anglo-Australian conversation.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 34(1): 76–99.
. 2016. “‘Just kidding’: Teasing and claims to non-serious intent.” Journal of Pragmatics 95: 120–136.
. 2017a. “Teasing.” In Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. by Salvatore Attardo, 204–218. New York and London: Routledge.
. 2017b. “Mockery and (non-)seriousness in initial interactions amongst American and Australian speakers of English.” In Handbook of Communication in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. by Donal Carbaugh, 104–177. London: Routledge.
Haugh, Michael, and Derek Bousfield. 2012. “Mock impoliteness in interactions amongst Australian and British speakers of English.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1099–1114.
Haugh, Michael, and Danielle Pillet-Shore. 2018. “Getting to know you: teasing as an invitation to intimacy in initial interactions.” Discourse Studies 20 (2): 246–269.
Haugh, Michael, and Lara Weinglass. 2020. “‘The Great Australian Pastime’: Pragmatic and semantic perspectives on taking the piss.” In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication: Ethnopragmatics and Semantic Analysis, ed. by Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters and Lauren Sadow, 95–117. Singapore: Springer Singapore.
Heritage, John. 2012. “Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29.
Holmes, Janet. 2000. “Politeness, power and provocation: How humour functions in the workplace.” Discourse Studies 2: 159–185.
Holmes, Janet, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2005. “Politeness, humor and gender in the workplace: Negotiating norms and identifying contestation.” Journal of Politeness Research 1: 121–149.
Holt, Elizabeth. 2010. “The last laugh: Shared laughter and topic termination.” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1513–1525.
. 2013. “‘There’s many a true word said in jest’: Seriousness and nonseriousness in interaction.” In Studies of Laughter in Interaction, ed. by Phillip Glenn and Elizabeth Holt, 69–89. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury.
Hutchby, Ian, and Robin Wooffitt. 2002. Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Idevall Hagren, Karin. 2020. “Membership categorisation analysis.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren, 41–55. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Johnsen, Ragni Vik. 2020. “Teasing and policing in a multilingual family. Negotiating and subverting norms and social hierarchies.” Journal of Pragmatics 158: 1–12.
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Andrea Szalai. 2020. “The socialisation of interactional rituals: A case study of ritual cursing as a form of teasing in Romani.” Pragmatics 30 (1): 15–39.
Kasper, Gabriele. 1996. “Politeness.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Jan-Ola Östman, Jef Verschueren, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Keltner, Dacher, Randall C. Young, Erin A. Heerey, Carmen Oemig, and Natalie D. Monarch. 1998. “Teasing in hierarchical and intimate relations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (5): 1231–1247.
Kotthoff, Helga. 1996. “Impoliteness and conversational joking: On relational politics.” Folia Linguistica 30 (3–4): 299–326.
. 2007. “Oral genres of humor: On the dialectic of genre knowledge and creative authoring.” Pragmatics 17 (2): 263–296.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightner, Robin M., Jullie M. Bollmer, Monica J. Harris, Richard Milich, and Douglas J. Scambler. 2000. “What do you say to teasers? Parent and child evaluations of responses to teasing.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 21 (4): 403–427.
Looney, Stephen Daniel. 2021. “Classroom teasing: Institutional contingencies and embodied action.” Discourse Studies 23 (4): 519–538.
Lytra, Vally. 2007. “Teasing in contact encounters: Frames, participant positions and responses.” Multilingua 26: 381–408.
. 2009. “Constructing academic hierarchies: Teasing and identity work among peers at school.” Pragmatics 19 (3): 449–466.
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen. 2015. “Jocular mockery in computer-mediated communication: A contrastive study of a Spanish and English Facebook community.” Journal of Politeness Research 11 (2): 289–327.
Mak, Bernie Chun Nam. 2018. “Humour in the workplace.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace, ed. by Bernadette Vine, 228–241. New York and London: Routledge.
Moody, Stephen J. 2019. “Contextualizing macro-level identities and constructing inclusiveness through teasing and self-mockery: A view from the intercultural workplace in Japan.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 145–159.
Partington, Alan. 2006. The Linguistics of Laughter: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Laughter-Talk. London: Routledge.
. 2008. “Teasing at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of face work in performing and responding to teases.” Text & Talk 28 (6): 771–792.
Pawluk, Cheryl J. 1989. “Social construction of teasing.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 19 (2): 145–167.
Pichler, Pia. 2006. “Multifunctional teasing as a resource for identity construction in the talk of British Bangladeshi girls”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10 (2): 225–249.
. 2019. “‘He’s got Jheri curls and Tims on’: Humour and indexicality as resources for authentication in young men’s talk about hair and fashion style.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 172–185.
Plester, Barbara A., and Janet Sayers. 2007. “‘Taking the piss’: Functions of banter in the IT industry.” Humor 20 (2): 157–87.
Priego-Valverde, Béatrice. 2016. “Teasing in casual conversations: An opportunistic discursive strategy.” In Metapragmatics of Humor: Current Research Trends, ed. by Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo, 215–233. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation.” Language 50: 696–735.
Schnurr, Stephanie. 2009. “Constructing leader identities through teasing at work.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1125–1138.
Schnurr, Stephanie, and Angela Chan. 2011. “When laughter is not enough. Responding to teasing and self-denigrating humour at work.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 20–35.
Shardakova, Maria. 2017. “Politeness, teasing, and humor.” In Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor, ed. by Salvatore Attardo, 219–233. London: Routledge.
Shively, Rachel L. 2013. “Learning to be funny in Spanish during study abroad: L2 humor development.” The Modern Language Journal 97 (4): 930–946.
Sinkeviciute, Valeria. 2013. “Decoding encoded (im)politeness: ‘Cause on my teasing you can depend’.” In Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory, ed. by Marta Dynel, 263–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2014. “‘When a joke’s a joke and when it’s too much’: Mateship as a key to interpreting jocular FTAs in Australian English.” Journal of Pragmatics 60: 121–139.
. 2017a. “‘Everything he says to me it’s like he stabs me in the face’: Frontstage and backstage reactions to teasing.” In Multiple Perspectives on Language Play, ed. by Nancy Bell, 169–198. Boston and Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
. 2017b. “What makes teasing impolite in Australian and British English? ‘Step[ping] over those lines […] you shouldn’t be crossing’.” Journal of Politeness Research 13 (2): 175–207.
. 2017c. “Funniness and ‘the preferred reaction’ to jocularity in Australian and British English: An analysis of interviewees’ metapragmatic comments.” Language & Communication 55: 41–54.
. 2017d. “‘It’s just a bit of cultural […] lost in translation’: Australian and British intracultural and intercultural metapragmatic evaluations of jocularity.” Lingua 197: 50–67.
. 2019a. Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness: A Pragmatic Analysis of Social Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2019b. “Juggling identities in interviews: The metapragmatics of ‘doing humour’.” Journal of Pragmatics 152: 216–227.
. 2019c (ed.). The interplay between humour and identity construction. Journal of Pragmatics 152. [URL]
Skalicky, Stephen, Cynthia M. Berger, and Nancy D. Bell. 2015. “The functions of ‘just kidding’ in American English.” Journal of Pragmatics 85: 18–31.
Straehle, Carolyn. 1993. “‘Samuel?’ ‘Yes, Dear?’ Teasing and conversational rapport.” In Framing in Discourse, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 210–230. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tholander, Michael, and Karin Aronsson. 2002. “Teasing as serious business: Collaborative staging and response work.” Text 22 (4): 559–595.
Tong, Ying, and Chaoqun Xie. 2021. “Complaining, teasing, and meme-framing: Socializing through Moments storytelling.” Internet Pragmatics 5 (1): 66–91.
Walkinshaw, Ian. 2016. “Teasing in informal contexts in English as an Asian lingua franca.” Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 5 (2): 249–271.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Cao, Ying
Hugman, Nicholas
2025. The dialectics of interpersonal relating in a sports team. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
