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In:The Dynamics of Interactional Humor: Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters
Edited by Villy Tsakona and Jan Chovanec
[Topics in Humor Research 7] 2018
► pp. 77–104

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Chapter 4
The pragmatics of humor in bilingual conversations

 | University of the Aegean
 | Ankara University
Published online: 5 January 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.7.04geo
Abstract
In this study, we analyze conversations recorded during ethnographic research the Muslim community of Rhodes, a Greek island close to Turkey's coast. The community is bilingual in Turkish and Greek. We examine aspects of the overall and sequential organization of talk as well as instances of humor produced by the code alternation choices that speakers of different ethnic origin, generation and social groups make during interaction. Being essentially a conversational practice, code-switching is primarily analyzed in the conversational context in which it appears as a meaningful choice of bilingual speakers. In this context, humorous code-switchings are seen as pertaining to a continuum of (a) discourse related alternations connected to pragmatic parameters of the organization of talk-in-interaction, and (b) participant related alternations strategically used for the construction of aspects of the bilingual identity as well as dynamic alignments among participants.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Conversation analysis of humorous code alternation practices
    • 2.1Bilingual conversation analysis
    • 2.2Bilingual humor
  • 3.The data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Organizing humorous narratives
    • 4.2Exploiting vocabulary discrepancies
    • 4.3The humorous construction of young deviance
    • 4.4Humorously targeting the young
    • 4.5Adult humorous bilingual talk
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (48)
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2022. Humour and self-interpreting in the media. In Humour in Self-Translation [Topics in Humor Research, 11], ► pp. 141 ff. DOI logo
Georgalidou, Marianthi, Vasilia Kourtis-Kazoullis & Hasan Kaili
2022. Humor in conversation among bilinguals. The European Journal of Humour Research 10:3 ► pp. 168 ff. DOI logo
Dynel, Marta & Valeria Sinkeviciute
2021. Conversational Humour. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 408 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Soziolinguistische Bibliographie europäischer Länder für 2018Sociolinguistic Bibliography of European Countries for 2018Bibliographie sociolinguistique des pays européens pour 2018. Sociolinguistica 34:1 ► pp. 277 ff. DOI logo
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