Does prosody play a specific role in conversational humor?

In this paper we use Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate conversational humor in talkin-interaction. We attempt to better understand how the latter is produced and co-constructed by participants in accounting for the devices used by participants in their sequential environment. The framework of CA enables us to take into account the various means available to speakers to communicate, orient to the others, etc. From our data, reported speech, confirmation request/answer and repetitions appear as the main discursive devices to create humor (presented as the result of the appearance of the incongruity). We focused on prosodic cues that are strongly involved in these devices and then contribute to the humorous tonality of the talk. Finally, the co-construction of conversational humor is mainly described through the notion of orientation and prosodic orientation. 1. CONVERSATIONAL HUMOR Conversational humor is the main focus of this article. Following Attardo (1994) or PriegoValverde (2003) among others, we know that it is a very complex phenomenon and that its boundaries are very difficult to delimitate principally because it is a multiform phenomenon. It can be short and correspond to a single utterance or it can be very long like the canned jokes or a whole sequence co-constructed by the participants. Its “tonality” is also very difficult to determine. Conversational humor may be simple jokes, teasing, wit, sarcasm, word play and so on. And most of the time, it may be several things at the same time (teasing jokes, friendly wit etc). Thus we can say that humor is often both friendly and aggressive. Because of this ambivalence, the interlocutors have to be very close to be able to perceive and/or appreciate humor. But humor, even between close friends, have its own boundaries or more precisely, humor has the boundaries fixed by the participants themselves which correspond to social, moral and of course personal limits. Thus, the subjects have to be on the same wavelength to make humor work. In our data, thanks to their close relationship, the two speakers are on the same wavelength and they laugh about the same things. Thus, each speaker chimes in on the other’s purpose until creating a whole humorous sequence. One thing is sure: conversational humor is a very interactive phenomenon. Usually, it appears as a lightning thanks to a thing done or said by the interlocutor and on which the humorist speaker chimes in or continues until it is turned into derision. Conversational humor is thus directly linked to the context. And in a conversational setting, the context has to be understood in a broad sense: the situation hic et nunc, the participants’ conversational history, their relationship and their shared knowledge. Using the framework of Conversational Analysis (henceforth CA) (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996; Couper-Kuhlen & Ford 2004) we attempt to better understand what is precisely