3/26 - Colloquium - International Pragmatics Association Conference practice talk
Three papers related to “Laughter and interactive stancetaking in English and Japanese food conversations”
---
Laughter and face maintenance in focus groups assessments
J.D. Coltz (Saarland University)
---
The Relationship Between Laughter and ‘Proper’ Behavior in Restaurant Conversations over Food
Vipasha Bansal (University of Minnesota) & Polly Szatrowski (University of Minnesota)
---
How stances towards high-calorie foods are displayed in Japanese food conversations
Polly Szatrowski (University of Minnesota)
---
Laughter and face maintenance in focus groups assessments
J.D. Coltz (Saarland University)
In this talk, I build on earlier studies of laughter associated with troubles talk (Jefferson 1984) and intimate talk (Jefferson et al. 1987) by exploring the role of laughter in the assessment of foods in focus groups. I show that laughter by an assessor accompanies potentially face-threatening assessments (FTAs; see Goffman 1967, Brown and Levinson 1978), and as such, corresponds to criticism-associated laughter in the framework of Chafe (2007). Specifically, laughter follows multimodal FTAs that the assessor considers in need of redressive action. The assessor’s laughter is therefore an act of negative politeness, or deference, that restores cooperativity among focus group participants. I discuss the implications of this finding for a model of assessment known as the Stance Triangle (Du Bois 2007).
The Relationship Between Laughter and ‘Proper’ Behavior in Restaurant Conversations over Food
Vipasha Bansal (University of Minnesota) & Polly Szatrowski (University of Minnesota)
This paper focuses on how participants use laughter to show what they consider ‘proper’ or appropriate behavior in a conversation between three women in an upscale urban restaurant. Laughter is used when behavior that is interpreted as inconvenient, impolite, or otherwise inappropriate is mentioned. Subsequently other participants laugh (or withhold laughter) to agree (or disagree) with the initiator of the laughter, showing their stance on the behavior under question. This research addresses three questions: When do the participants laugh? What functions does the laughter serve? How is laughter used in an utterance sequence in the interaction?
How stances towards high-calorie foods are displayed in Japanese food conversations
Polly Szatrowski (University of Minnesota)
In this presentation I investigate how Japanese participants co-construct their attitudes toward eating high-calorie foods in a corpus of Taster Lunches. Building on Wiggins’ (2009) study of weight management in conversational interaction, and Fuller, Briggs & Dillon-Sumner’s (2013) demonstration that the theme “women eat for weight loss” prevails in women’s health magazines, I analyze how participants co-construct their dietary worries, practices and preferences through multi-modal stances using linguistic devices including epistemic forms, onomatopoeia, agreement responses and laughter. Results contribute to research on contextualized social and cognitive activity, the socio-psychological construction of norms, and research on the linguistics of food (Gerhardt, Frobenius, & Ley 2013, Szatrowski 2014, and others).