Laughter as language

Bibliographic Data

ID22130622
AuthorsJonathan Ginzburg (0000-0001-5737-0991, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Chiara Mazzocconi (0000-0002-8267-1590, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Ye Tian (0000-0003-0545-942X, MediaTek (China))
Year2020
Volume5
Issue1
Publication date2020-11-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlossa a journal of general linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2397-1835 • E-ISSN: 2397-1835
PublisherOpen Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5334/gjgl.1152
OpenAlexW3094912909
LanguageEN
Citations received18
References cited93

Understanding the import of laughter, has interested philosophers and literary scholars for millennia and, more recently, psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and linguists. However, the assumption has been that laughter lacks meaning akin to what words and phrases possess and that it does not contribute to the compositional construction of meaning. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, laughter (and other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, frowning) has propositional content—it involves reference to external real world events, has stand alone meanings, and participates in semantic and pragmatic processes like repair, implicature, and irony. We show how to develop a formal semantic and pragmatic account of laughter embedded in a general theory of conversational interaction and emotional reasoning and show how to explain the wide, indeed in principle unbounded range of uses laughter exhibits. We show how our account can be extended to other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, eye rolling, and frowning. Should laughter and its ilk be incorporated in the grammar? We suggest that they probably should be, if one assumes a conversationally–oriented view of grammar. But various open issues remain

Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Grammar · Implicature · Irony · Laughter · Linguistics · Pragmatics · Computer Science · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Humor Studies and Applications · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access