Dialogic resources in interactional humour

Journal of Pragmatics 153 (2019) 1e14

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Dialogic resources in interactional humour Lorenzo Logi*, Michele Zappavigna School of Arts & Media, Arts and Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 20 November 2018 Received in revised form 15 July 2019 Accepted 15 July 2019 Available online 18 September 2019

This paper presents a social semiotic analysis of a stand-up comedy text. Its aim is to explore how dialogic resources contribute to humour. The research is informed by the concept of affiliation in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory and work on interactional humour. Laughter is treated as a marker for the deferral of social values that create nonthreatening tension with interactants' shared community affiliation. Dialogic resources such as projected speech are shown to play an important role in positioning the comedian's alignment to social values, and function to amplify the tension created. The analysis also shows how the bonds negotiated in the text can be grouped into hierarchies of specificity, with more specific bonds sustaining more general bonds across phases of discourse. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Interactional humour Stand-up comedy Social semiotics Affiliation Dialogism

1. Introduction: stand-up comedy and dialogism in interactional humour This paper applies a social semiotic analytical framework to stand-up comedy discourse. It explores how interactional humour can be explained as the negotiation1 of values between comedian and audience, focusing on the role dialogic resources play in defining alignment to values. By interactional humour, we refer to the sub-field within humour studies that analyses humour in real-life interactive circumstances and therefore accounts for variables such as reactions to humour, social functions of humour and sociocultural parameters of humour (Chovanec and Tsakona, 2018). By dialogic resources we refer to the region of semiosis concerned with dialogism and projected voice (as per Bakhtin (2010)) and extra-vocalisation (White, 1998). While the study of humour within linguistics is well established, research into the dynamics of interactional humour has received relatively limited attention (Chovanec and Tsakona, 2018, p. 2). Exploration of the phenomenon of interactional humour as social semiosis is nascent, and there is no social semiotic work to date on stand-up comedy. Despite this, substantial literature from the fields of linguistics, media and cultural studies attests to the role stand-up comedy plays as a forum for the discussion of values (among others, see (Aarons and Mierowsky, 2017; Greenbaum, 1999; Koziski, 1984; Mintz, 1985). The genre is thus ripe for social semiotic analysis, with comedians adroitly leveraging notions of taboo and transgression to reveal underlying social mores.

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (L. Logi), [email protected] (M. Zappavigna). 1 The term ‘negotiate’ is adapted from the sociological tradition originating with Goffman (1959) which proposes that identities are negotiated between interactants; here, social values as construed through interpersonal and experiential linguistic resources are considered discrete components contributing to interactants' identities. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.07.010 0378-2166/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Linguistic theories of humour can be broadly divided into three strands: superiority theory, release/relief theory and ~ anes, 2017). Of these, incongruity theory has emerged as dominant for the explanation of incongruity theory (Larkin-Galin semantic and pragmatic mechanisms of humour in decontextualized humorous texts (Dynel, 2008, p. 2). These theories have been combined and elaborated as the General Theory for Verbal Humour (Attardo, 1994; Attardo and Raskin, 1991), which centres around the notion that humour arises when a text simultaneously construes multiple incompatible meanings. Solely incongruity-based explanations of humour have not, however, met with such success in the study of interactional humour in communicative contexts such as stand-up comedy performances. As Chovanec and Tsakona (2018, p. 13) point out, “aspects of humor dynamics such as framing devices, reactions to humor, the sociocultural particularities of interactants and the groups/ communities they belong to, are not captured by [the General Theory of Verbal Humour].” Instead, pragmatic, sociolinguistic and social semiotic theories of humour that accommodate the role of contextual variables such as interpersonal power dynamics, solidarity, and affiliation are proving fruitful in the elaboration of a comprehensive framework for the exploration of interactional humour (Chovanec and Tsakona, 2018). In this vein, scholars examining interactional humour have employed methodologies such as discourse and conversation s-Conde, 1997; Karachaliou and Archakis, 2018; Norrick, 1993; Norrick and Chiaro, 2009) to explore analysis (Boxer and Corte the dynamics of humour in dialogic contexts. While remaining in a broadly cognitive frame of interpretation, these approaches have asserted resolution in the form of a humour response as a necessary sequel to incongruity in explaining interactional humour (Dynel, 2008, pp. 3e4). Within this branch of research, contexts such as casual conversation and workplace conversation have attracted the most attention, while stand-up comedy has been the focus of only a handful of studies (recent examples include Aarons and Mierowsky, 2017; Cain, 2018; Dore, 2018; Glick, 2007; Scarpetta and Spagnolli, 2009; Schwarz, 2010). Among these, only Glick (2007) focuses on the role of dialogic resources in the genre, which, given the affordances of stand-up comedy (a single performer narrating scenarios with the aim of eliciting the audience's laughter) are unsurprisingly common. While Glick's analysis is insightful, we argue that a Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL)informed approach yields greater clarity and detail to understanding how these resources contribute to the creation of humour, hence the focus of this paper. We will begin by introducing a social semiotic approach to humour analysis, comparing it to other approaches, and explaining its utility in exploring interactional humour. We then describe the SFL theory of bonding and affiliation which treats humour as a resource interactants employ to negotiate social bonds and affiliate with value communities. The ‘Data and methodology’ section presents both the data and the analytical framework used in the analysis, together with the data coding rubric. Issues with the current SFL framework for coding dialogic resources, and our proposed response to these, are presented in Section 4. Section 5 then steps through the analysis of two excerpts of text. In the ‘Conclusion’ section, the results of the analysis are contextualised within the fields of interactional humour studies and SFL, including discussion of the limitations of this research and future directions of study. 2. Humour and affiliation A central function of interactional humour is to diffuse the tension generated by forays into transgressive territory and to manifest shared community identity through collective behaviour (Scarpetta and Spagnolli, 2009). Accordingly, analysing how values are negotiated between interactants in humorous texts offers insight into humour's role in forging social connections between individuals and communities. A conceptualisation of humour as a social semiotic phenomenon is congruent with this aim. SFL theory offers a cohesive framework for exploring the semiotic resources involved in the creation of humour. Halliday expresses this potential concisely, stating: Verbal play involves all elements in the linguistic system, from rhyme and rhythm to vocabulary and structure. But the essence of verbal play is playing with meaning; including… playing with the meaning that is inherent in the social structure. (Halliday, 1978, p. 160) SFL research into convivial conversation among friends has shown that humour in that context is an important resource for interactants to negotiate social values and co-construct individual and community identities (Knight, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013; Martin et al., 2013; Zappavigna, 2011, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2018; Zappavigna and Martin, 2018). These mechanisms are described by the model of affiliation. Knight defines affiliation as “a process of co-identification between conversational participants who construe their identities instance by instance in the linguistic text” (2010, p. 206). Affiliation allows individuals within a culture to simultaneously navigate membership in multiple communities and “negotiate who [they] are through talk” (Knight, 2010, p. 203, italics in original). The affiliation model expands on work by (Martin, 2004, 2008; Stenglin, 2008; Martin and Stenglin, 2006) which proposed ‘bonds’ as the social semiotic units of analysis representing shared values among interactants. Stenglin (2004, p. 22) describes bonding as the ways in which interactants “[build] togetherness, inclusiveness and affiliation”, which aligns them into “overlapping communities of attitudinal rapport” (Martin, 2016, p. 323). Accordingly, attitudes, sentiments, feelings, etc. enacted in language present potential bonding opportunities to be negotiated among interactants. The SFL model of bonding and affiliation thus shares some commonality with the field of research on €rkk€ €inen observe, stance is negotiated “through stance as per (Du Bois, 2007; Du Bois, Ka ainen, 2012). As Du Bois & K€ arkka overt communicative means, in which participants evaluate something, and thereby position themselves, and thereby align with co-participants in interaction” (2012, p. 446). While the SFL affiliation model can be loosely grouped with other theories of interactional humour, in keeping with SFL's social semiotic underpinnings the model privileges interpretation of humour as

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an interpersonal, manifested phenomena rather than an individual, internal one. Thus, references to ‘tension’ and ‘resolution’ (commonly used terms in canonical literature on relief/release theories for humour) describe the negotiation of identity and community among interactants, rather than individuals' cognitive experiences. According to Knight's (2010) affiliation model, a bond is realised in discourse as a ‘coupling’, defined as “any coordinated choice across semiotic systems” (Zhao, 2011, p. 144). The analytical framework for identifying these couplings in discourse analysis will be described in Section 3. While this definition accommodates resources across any and all relevant semiotic systems, the most frequently explored to date has been the combination of evaluative and ideational meaning. For instance, an utterance such as “that's a terrible moral for children” [46:41]2 construes a coupling of negative evaluation (‘terrible’), for the ideational entity ‘that… moral’. In light of the co-text this can be interpreted as tabling3 the bond: ‘nursery rhyme morals are inappropriate for children’. Knight's research identified three affiliation strategies, summarised in Table 1. Communing affiliation encompasses bond negotiations where interactants jointly construe a shared bond, either through repetition or agreement, and thereby jointly affiliate into a shared community. For example, in the excerpt from Knight's data in Table 2 drawn from conversation among friends: the words “awesome” and “love” construe positive evaluation for the ideational target “pie party”. This progressively tables and communes a ‘fun pie party’ bond that interactants rally around as co-members of a community that shares this bond. Table 1 Summary of affiliation strategies (based on Knight, 2010, p. 217). Strategy

COMMUNING

LAUGHING

CONDEMNING

Strategic “action”

Sharing a bond or rallying around a bonding icon (e.g. a flag) Rallying/Epideictic

Deferring an unshared potential bond, communing around an implicated bond Wrinklea Humour

Rejecting an unshareable potential bond to commune around a shared bond

Type of tension Characteristic discourse

violation Gossip/conflict

a This paper will employ the term ‘wrinkle’ following Martin and White (2005, p. 90) who cite Suzanne Eggins as coining the term in her work on causal conversation where “laughter is usually provoked by wrinkles in an interaction, not happiness”.

Table 2 Example of communing affiliation (adapted from (Knight, 2010, p. 324)). Speaker

Verbiage

Coupling

Bonds (communed, implicated, THREATENING, DEFERRED)

C

This was an awesome pie party guys I love pie parties I can't wait to have another one

Positive evaluation þ pie party

‘fun pie party’

Positive evaluation þ pie party Positive evaluation þ pie party

‘fun pie party’ ‘fun pie party’

N C

Condemning and laughing affiliation involve two bonds in tension: a threatening, tabled bond and a shared, implicated bond. In condemning affiliation, the tabled bond violates a bond already shared by interactants (which is therefore implicated). This leads to unreconcilable tension that is resolved through rejection. Interactants affiliate by jointly rejecting the tabled bond and communing around the shared, implicated bond it violates. Condemning affiliation is characteristic of gossip discourse, as can be seen in the example from Knight's data in Table 3: Table 3 Example of condemning affiliation (adapted from (Knight, 2010, p. 233)). Speaker

Verbiage

Coupling

Bonds (communed, implicated, THREATENING, DEFERRED)

K

It was the way she would act sometimes would be very… kinda negative. And we'd-we'd try like to keep a positive environment… (at the tech), you can be motivating but It's not very motivating to have someone yelling at you for stuff, and Mm hm

Negative evaluation + criticism

DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM motivating encouragement

G

2 3

Positive evaluation + keeping positive motivating encouragement Negative appreciation + yelling

timestamps are used throughout this paper to refer to point in Gervais (2008) where examples are found. ‘tabling’ is the term used to describe the construal of a potential bond that has not yet been negotiated.

DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

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Here, K's evaluation of a person's behaviour as negative construes a bond of ‘destructive criticism’. This violates an implicated ‘motivating encouragement’ bond, which K subsequently tables as a shared bond. G's acknowledgement jointly rejects the ‘destructive criticism’ bond and rallies with K around the ‘motivating encouragement’ bond. Laughing affiliation involves the deferral of a tabled bond which is in tension with but does not violate an implicated bond. As Knight (2010, p. 223) observes, “The tension created in laughing affiliation discourses is a wrinkle because it is nonthreatening and can be easily ironed out [through laughter]”. For instance, in another excerpt from Knight's data shown in Table 4 where young women are discussing how much they enjoy eating pie, knight codes the repeated positive evaluation for eating and pie as tabling a bond of ‘happy fatness’, with which the speakers may commune in other circumstances (such as the holiday period, when they were eating with their families). Crucially, however, the speakers now defer this bond in favour of the implicated ‘beautiful thinness’ bond which they jointly affiliate with in their current community (young female students). As both bonds are potentially shareable, the ‘happy fatness bond’ is not rejected but deferred, and the tension between them can be laughed off. Thus, in diffusing tension created by wrinkling bonds and manifesting affiliation for shared bonds, the SFL model of affiliation conceptualises humour as the movement from tension to resolution through laughter. This synchronises with the incongruity-resolution dynamic referenced in the interactional humour studies mentioned above. Table 4 Example of deferring affiliation (adapted from (Knight, 2010, p. 226)). Speaker

Verbiage

Coupling

Bonds (communed, implicated, THREATENING, DEFERRED)

U N [all] N U

I ate well. We all ate well. [Laughter] Dude, we all ate good pie! Yes, I agree. On a diet now.

Positive evaluation þ eating Positive evaluation þ eating

HAPPY FATNESS HAPPY FATNESS

Positive evaluation þ pie Negative evaluation þ selves

HAPPY FATNESS beautiful thinness

The analytical framework used here follows Kotthoff (2000, p. 64) in interpreting laughter as the “contextualisation cue for humour par excellence”. While we note that the relationship between laughter and humour has been the subject of extensive and conflicting discussion (Attardo, 1994) and is not bi-unique, a more nuanced analysis of the role and nature of laughter in the text is beyond the scope of this study. Integrated into the affiliation framework, laughter is therefore considered to signal instances of a deferral response to a tabled bond; as Knight (2010, p. 207) states: “laughter offers a concrete signal that couplings are creating some tension in the community belonging being construed”. In adopting Knight's model for analysing the negotiation of bonds we are conscious of the register and genre differences between casual conversation among friends and stand-up comedy. Perhaps most important among these are the increased social distance between audience and comedian and among the majority of audience members, and the comedian's virtual monopoly of speech. The latter is compounded by the foregrounding of the comedian's semiotic resources via microphones and audio equipment, stage lights and sometimes even enlarged projections of their faces. The contrast in the social purpose of the two genres (as per Martin and Rose (2008)) must also be acknowledged. While casual conversation among friends employs humour as one of a variety of strategies for negotiating identity and community affiliation (Eggins and Slade, 1997), stand-up comedy is explicitly geared towards encouraging a humour response. Moreover, in stand-up comedy humour is commodified: being made to laugh is the service the audience expects in exchange for the money they have paid to attend the performance, and the comedian needs to delivery in order to justify their own monetary gain. Presumably, these asymmetrical expectations of and material relationships with stand-up comedy performances affect how interactants respond to the bonds tabled for negotiation. While this subject certainly merits further enquiry, it is beyond the scope of the current paper. Despite these differences, there is precedent for drawing parallels between the humour found in casual conversation and that of stand-up comedy. As Dore (2018, p. 109) observes, “from an interactional point of view, stand-up routines can be compared to instances of casual conversational humour”. Dore points out that beyond the primary response of laughter, audiences contribute to unfolding discourse through “cheering, whooping, and applause as well as jeers, boos, etc.” (Dore, 2018, p. 109). Scarpetta and Spagnolli (2009, pp. 214-215) echo this, considering stand-up comedy an “institutional form of talk-in-interaction”. This perspective is argued even more emphatically by Brodie (2008, pp. 153-154), who states that: stand-up comedy is a form of talk. It implies a context that allows for reaction, participation, and engagement on the part of those to whom the stand-up comedian is speaking… However heavily one-sided, it is nevertheless a dialogic form, performed not to but with an audience. Furthermore, the audience can be considered collectively as a sole interactant in the dialogue. As Rutter (2001, p. 2) comments, “the audience act as a collective …. the interaction becomes “pseudo-dyadic”: while remaining individuals, audience members choose to act as part of a collective for a particular piece of interaction.” Moreover, Knight's affiliation model has to date been successfully adapted to a variety of genres and modes arguably even more distant from casual conversation, including academic discourse (Hao and Humphrey, 2009; Hood, 2010), business writing (Szenes, 2017), legal discourse (Martin et al. 2013; Szenes, 2017), and social media discourse (Zappavigna, 2011, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2018; Zappavigna and Martin, 2018). As such, while tempered by caution in investigating how affiliation might be unfolding in an as yet unexplored linguistic context, we are confident that the chosen analytical framework is suited to at the very least beginning the task.

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3. Dataset and method The text analysed in this paper is comedian, actor and writer Ricky Gervais' 2008 stand-up comedy performance Out of England (Gervais, 2008). The data set for this paper comprises an approximately 5-min [48:55-52:56], 1,568-word section of the text.4 The section is the second half of a ‘bit’5 which features a sequence where the comedian jokingly argues that nursery rhyme6 morals are not relevant to children, progressing from the story of Lazy Mouse through that of The Boy who Cried Wolf and Jack and Jill before focusing on Humpty Dumpty. After reciting the words to the nursery rhyme, the comedian goes on to extrapolate what its moral might be, proposing increasingly absurd interpretations. While the entire section relating to Humpty Dumpty was manually coded, due to the level of detail of the theoretical and analytical description required, the excerpts in Tables 5 and 6 will be the focus of the analysis and discussion in this paper. Table 5 Humpty Dumpty excerpt 1: ‘eggs’. Timestamp

Speaker

Talk

48:54-48:57 48:57-49:00 49:00-49:03 49:03-49:05 49:05-49:18

Comedian Audience Comedian Audience Comedian

49:18-49:19 49:19-49:22 49:22-49:25 49:25-29:29 49:29-49:30 49:30-49:35

Audience Comedian Audience Comedian Audience Comedian

49:36-49:37 49:37-49:46

Audience Comedian

49:44-49:47

Audience

how is that applicable to five-year-olds I have never worked out the moral to humpty dumpty ‘humpty dumpty sat on a wall humpty dumpty had a great fall all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put humpty together again’ all i can think is “don't sit on a wall if you're an egg” but again how is that applicable to a five-year-old human i mean you tell that to a group of [five-year olds] “so don't sit on a wall if you're an egg” “what do you mean ‘if I'm an egg’ I'm not an egg” it doesn't make sense if I'm none of us have are eggs if there was an egg it wouldn't make sense cos you go to the egg “don't sit on a wall” “I'm an egg i can't hear you I've got nothing I've got no ears”

Table 6 Humpty Dumpty excerpt 2: ‘horses’. Timestamp

Speaker

Talk

50:28-50:31 50:31-50:33 50:33-50:37 50:37-50:39 50:39-50:42 50:42-50:45 50:45-50-49 50:49-50:50 50:50-50:51 50:51-50:52 50:52-51:00

Comedian Audience Comedian Audience Comedian Audience Comedian Audience Comedian Audience Comedian

51:00-51:02

Audience

don't send send a horse a delicate an egg “we've got a cracked egg shall we send a horse” definitely not  don't… have you got a doctor, or someone who works for Faberge “we've- we've- we've got like a half a ton creature with no fingers” no don't send that “got a four-legged thing with like a” no no no chance they can't they [couldn't] put on [gloves] they couldn't scrub up

As a logical extension of the SFL theoretical framework, the methodology of discourse analysis as outlined by Martin and Rose (2007) was employed in analysing the data. The text was manually coded to identify resources within the SFL discourse semantic systems of APPRAISAL and IDEATION. The text was first transcribed with the help of the YouTube website's transcribe function, which produced a time-stamped transcription. This was then manually edited and combined in a table including audience laughter location and duration, as per Tables 5 and 6 (overlaps in time-stamps indicate the comedian is speaking simultaneously to the

4 corresponding to the video clip available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼UwAookPFWZQ and Daily Motion: https://www. dailymotion.com/video/x2icevg (date of access: 15.7.2019). 5 ‘Bit’ is used here in the tradition of stand-up comedy vernacular to refer to a thematically consistent unit in a longer performance or routine. See Brodie (2008, p. 163) for further discussion. 6 The comedian groups these texts as ‘nursery rhymes’, but we are aware this definition may be problematic; in fact, conventions associated to the ‘nursery rhyme’ genre and the degree to which they apply across these texts contribute to how the comedian tables potential bonds for deferral.

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audience laughing7). This transcription approach follows the principles proposed by Edwards and Lampert (2014), focusing on isolating the relevant unit of analysis and maximising readability. Consequently, given that the scope of the analytical framework employed does not include phonological or other paralinguistic features, text has been transcribed verbatim but without annotation for pauses, intonation, loudness, etc. The text has been punctuated to signal projected speech, which has been marked by inverted commas. Furthermore, instances where the talk was unclear but could be plausibly inferred from co-text (see 49:30-49:35, Table 5) have been rendered in square brackets. 4. Construing bonds as dialogic couplings of Persona

ENGAGEMENT

and Value Position

As noted earlier, the investigation of how dialogic resources contribute to the creation of humour in stand-up comedy has to date received only limited attention. While the SFL model for humorous affiliation provides a coherent social semiotic framework for the exploration of interactional humour, the existing coding rubric does not isolate the role dialogic resources play in humorous discourse. Within this rubric, dialogic resources, described in SFL by the system of ENGAGEMENT, have been coded as instances of indirect evaluation. As Knight observes, “ENGAGEMENT resources are used in humorous phases to afford attitudes that couple and to enhance the humorous play.” (Knight, 2010, p. 184). However, early analysis of the data for this paper suggested that conflating these two regions of semiotic resources poses several problems. In response, we propose dialogic couplings as a unit of analysis better suited to capturing the role of these resources. Before proceeding with the description of dialogic couplings, however, the SFL system of ENGAGEMENT will be introduced in some detail. Within SFL theory, dialogic resources are described by ENGAGEMENT (Martin and White, 2005). ENGAGEMENT encompasses linguistic elements described in other theoretical frameworks as “attribution, modality, hearsay, concession, polarity, evidentiality, hedges, boosters and metadiscursives” (White, 2001). ENGAGEMENT resources can be divided between those that allow for alternate positions and voices (dialogic expansion), and those that dismiss or reject them (dialogic contraction) (Martin and White, 2005, p. 102). The system of ENGAGEMENT, with examples from the text, is presented in Fig. 1.

deny (Don’t sit on a wall if you’re an egg) [49:19] disclaim disclaim (but again, how is that applicable to a five-year-old?) [49:25] contract

affirm (of course they couldn’t put him together again) [50:15] concur concede (it’s bad, the effects are sll being felt today, but it ended a war…) [39:38] proclaim

pronounce (This is absolutely true…) [24:03]

endorse (this is from a website called…) [1:03:23] entertain (this may be the greatest sentence ever wrien) [31:21] expand

acknowledge (According to him, I should have…) [19:53] aribute distance (Contrary to popular belief…) [34:16] Fig. 1.

ENGAGEMENT

system, adapted from (Martin and White, 2005, p. 134).

Of particular relevance to this research are dialogic resources which construe projected voice. These are described by the features expand: attribute: acknowledge (where the authorial voice remains neutral to the projected voice and verbiage, often realised by projection verbs such as ‘say’, ‘tell’, ‘comment’, etc.) and expand: attribute: distance (where the authorial voice distances itself from the projected voice and verbiage, often realised through verbal processes such as ‘claim’ ‘allege’, etc.). For example, the comedian's utterance,

ENGAGEMENT

I mean you tell that to a group of [five-year-olds]8 ‘so don't sit on a wall if you're an egg’ [49:32]

7 Coding laughter presents a variety of challenges (see Hepburn and Varney (2013) for a comprehensive review of this subject); primarily for this research, the issue of sporadic, isolated laughs interspersed between louder, collective laughs rendered defining the start and end of a laugh turn problematic. In response, instances of laughter comprising isolated, individual laughs were not included in the coding. 8 in the text, the words that fall between the square brackets are unintelligible, but an initial [fɑ] sound suggests the comedian may have been intending to say ‘five’, and in light of the opening phrase in the passage it seems safe to assume ‘a group of five-year olds’ would again be the receiver here.

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contains the verbal process ‘tell’ following the sayer: ‘you’, which conveys that the embedded clause ‘don't sit on a wall if you're an egg’ is to be attributed to the voice, ‘you’. Thus, whatever ENGAGEMENT resources and value positions are construed in the projected verbiage can be attributed to this voice. ENGAGEMENT resources determine the positioning of a voice with respect to a value position and can loosely be divided between those that serve to align with or support value positions, and those that reject or disalign (see Han (2015) and Doran (2019) for further discussion on dis/alignment from/with value positions). These valences are summarised in Table 7, but it must be noted that coding for alignment often requires consideration of text co-occurring with the ENGAGEMENT resources identified. An example from the text of an ENGAGEMENT resource construing disalignment can be found during the comedian's discussion of the moral to the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill, when the comedian says, “How is that applicable to five-year-olds” [48:54]. Here the phonology of the verbiage9 combines with our understanding of the register to signal a rhetorical question. In light of the preceding co-text, we infer that the implied answer is ‘it's not’. This construes the ENGAGEMENT feature of contract: disclaim: deny, by which the comedian disaligns from the value position, ‘Jack and Jill moral is applicable to children’. By rejecting a position the comedian implicitly acknowledges its counterpoint. The utterance thus simultaneously construes the feature contract: concur: affirm, which aligns the comedian with the value position: ‘Nursery rhyme morals are not applicable to children’. Table 7 Alignment valencies of

ENGAGEMENT

features.

As mentioned earlier, in Knight's original framework for coding evaluative couplings, resources in the system of ENGAGEMENT are considered as instances of invoked ATTITUDE. As Knight observes, ““Engagement” is another system of appraisal that accounts for how speakers variously commit themselves to what they are saying, and is a useful tool in interpreting implicit evaluations in talk” (Knight, 2013, p. 560). Accordingly, Knight codes ENGAGEMENT features in her data as instances of invoked evaluation10 as can be seen in Table 8. Table 8 ENGAGEMENT

as afforded evaluation (Knight, 2010, p.185, italics in original).

9 Phonological analysis shows a falling (Tone 1) tone contour to both tone groups ‘How is that applicable to’ and ‘five-year-olds’, indicating a declarative mood in the clause (Halliday and Greaves, 2008). 10 Knight terms these ‘tokens’ of evaluation, and annotates them with a ‘t-‘ preceding the feature of ATTITUDE invoked.

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Knight accompanies this analysis with detailed commentary to explain how dialogic resources indirectly realise evaluative meaning. While not inaccurate, this approach frustrates analysis of longer passages of discourse where multiple features of the ENGAGEMENT system interact. Furthermore, in texts with fewer explicit evaluative resources and more numerous dialogic resources, it becomes challenging to isolate evaluative couplings that are being aligned with or disaligned from and present analysis in a clear format. This was found to be the case when analysing the text for this paper. For instance, in the comedian's verbiage, you tell that to a group of [five-year olds] “so don't sit on a wall if you're an egg” “what do you mean ‘if I'm an egg’ I'm not an egg” [49:30] an analysis coding ENGAGEMENT resources as evaluation would identify a coupling of negative evaluation for the ideational target ‘Humpty Dumpty moral’ (referred to by “that”). This coding skims over the role of the projected dialogue in construing the Humpty Dumpty moral as absurd, with the voice of the ‘child’ challenging the voice of the ‘adult's interpretation of the moral (a full analysis of this stretch of text is presented in the ‘Analysis’ section, below). In response, dialogic couplings are here proposed as a unit of analysis that provides a clearer and more detailed account of how dialogic resources contribute to the creation of humour. The semiotic resources combining to form dialogic couplings are derived from (Martin and White, 2005) and consist of Persona, ENGAGEMENT feature and Value Position. Persona refers to the textual persona construed within a text, which can be either authorial (the persona of the creator of the text) or projected (as frequently construed by the sayer in a verbal process clause). ENAGAGEMENT resource refers to the feature of ENGAGEMENT realised in the text. Accounting for ENGAGEMENT resources attributed to projected voices thereby allows for recursive dialogic resources to be accurately coded, as are often found where a comedian recounts a projected exchange between multiple Personae. Value Position is defined as the perspective targeted by the ENGAGEMENT resource. The resources involved in construing Value Positions are drawn from the IDEATION system, which “focuses on sequences of activities, the people and things involved with them, and their associated places and qualities” (Martin and Rose, 2007, p. 73). Value Positions build on the original ‘ideational target’ entity specified in evaluative couplings by introducing the possibility of targeting whole clauses rather than individual entities, rendered with the assistance of nominalisation, substitution and synonyms (see Martin (1992)). Thus, returning to the example above, we would code the verbiage as per Table 9.

Table 9 Dialogic coupling analysis. Verbiage (arranged in turns according to Voice and Value position) you tell that to a group of [five-year-olds] “so don't sit on a wall if you're an egg.” “what do you mean ‘if I'm an egg’? I'm not an egg.”

ENGAGEMENT: Authorial voice

expand: attribute: acknowledge expand: attribute: acknowledge expand: attribute: acknowledge

ENGAGEMENT: Projected voice

Value position targeted

Persona

resource

Adult

contract: disclaim: deny

Sitting on wall is good if you're an egg

Child

contract: disclaim: deny

Children can be eggs

Child

contract: concur: deny

Children can be eggs

These dialogic couplings can be written as [adult: deny / Sitting on wall is good if you're an egg]11 [child: deny / children can be eggs] [child: deny / children can be eggs] Coded as such, we can see the incongruity between the Value Positions targeted by the two Personae. The child reinterprets the adult's verbiage as aligning with the Value Position, ‘children can be eggs’, which they then reject. Viewed in light of its preceding co-text, the projected exchange allows us to identify how a bond of ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies children can be eggs’ is tabled by the comedian and laughed off by the audience. A dialogic coupling analysis thus provides both a clearer notation and greater insight into how dialogic resources construe Personae and Value Positions, and how projected interaction can enact bonds for negotiation.

11 This notation is an adaptation of that presented in [Author A]. The square brackets ([]) enclose the semiotic resources interacting in the coupling. The entity listed before the colon (:) is the persona, and the forward slash (/) links the ENGAGEMENT feature (before the forward slash) with the value position it is targeting (after the forward slash).

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5. Analysis Analysing the text within this framework allows us to map how the comedian uses dialogic resources to construe Value Positions and align Personae in relation to them. Based on this, we identify the bonds under negotiation between comedian and audience and infer the degree of tension between them. Dialogic couplings identified in the excerpts and the bonds they construe are shown in Tables 10 and 11. Let us begin by returning to the comedian's utterance, “How is that applicable to five-year-olds” (Turn 1, Table 10) Here, the comedian rejects the Value Position ‘Jack and Jill moral is applicable to children’ and implicitly aligns with the position ‘Nursery rhyme morals are not applicable to children’. Accordingly, the bond tabled is glossed as ‘nursery rhyme morals are not relevant for children’. The ensuing laughter from the audience tells us this bond is in tension with an implicated, shared bond (posited here as ‘nursery rhyme morals are relevant for children’12). As we will see in the analysis below, these primary, opposing bonds frame the affiliative landscape for this section of the text and demark the categories into which a series of secondary bonds can be grouped. We will call these secondary bonds ‘encapsulated’ bonds as they serve to sustain the primary bonds, and annotate them, in keeping with SFL clause complexing notation, as a, b, g, etc. The comedian's next comment, “I have never worked out the moral to Humpty Dumpty” (Turn 2, Table 10) distances the comedian from the Value Position: ‘Humpty Dumpty Moral makes sense’ and simultaneously aligns him with the position, ‘Humpty Dumpty moral doesn’t make sense’. This tables an a encapsulated bond, ‘nursery rhyme morals are difficult to understand’ which sustains the earlier ‘nursery rhyme morals are irrelevant to children’ primary tabled bond, as what is unintelligible to an adult is logically even more opaque for a child. After reciting the text of the nursery rhyme, the comedian then speculates on what its moral might be, stating “All I can think is ‘don't sit on a wall if you're an egg’” (Turn 4, Table 10) This can be rendered as “[The only thing] I can think [the Humpty Dumpty moral could be] is ‘don't sit on a wall if you're an egg’”. As such, ‘The only thing I can think’ realises the ENGAGEMENT feature of expand: entertain, as the comedian proposes his personal interpretation of what the moral might be, thus slightly aligning with it but allowing for alternatives.13 Identifying the bonds in play here requires a common-sense reading of the comedian's proposed interpretation, which reveals the absurdity of the instruction. This absurdity is predicated on the impossible causal relation of condition (as per (Martin and Rose, 2007, p. 128)) signalled by the “if” between the occurrence figures14 ‘don't sit on a wall’ and ‘you're an egg’. Humans cannot be eggs, and eggs are inanimate and thus incapable of being the receiver in dialogue. Accordingly, the comedian's utterance tables an ‘Humpty Dumpty moral is absurd’ bond. The ensuing laughter from the audience signals bonds in tension, so we can extrapolate that the implicated bond the audience share can be glossed as ‘Humpty Dumpty moral is not absurd’. Again, this is commensurate with the genre conventions for nursery rhymes previously established by the comedian, and thus sustains the primary implicated bond of ‘nursery rhyme morals are relevant to children’. Returning to the projected exchange between adult and child in Turns 6e10 (Table 10), we can see how the comedian sets up a projected exchange between Personae glossed here as an adult and a five-year-old child. The adult's opening instruction to the child, “so don't sit on a wall if you're an egg” rejects the Value Position ‘sitting on a wall is acceptable if you're an egg’. The child's response construes a rhetorical question with an implied negation: “what do you mean, ‘if I'm an egg’?” and an explicit negation: “I'm not an egg”. These target the Value Position ‘Children can be eggs’ (rendered from the isolated causal relation of condition ‘if you're an egg’ in the adult's projected verbiage), and implicitly align the child with the Value Position ‘children can't be eggs'. As such, the child Persona's response re-interprets the adult Persona's utterance as aligning with the Value Position ‘children can be eggs'. By projecting these Personae and acting out the scenario of their dialogue, the comedian links his earlier interpretation of the Humpty Dumpty moral, ‘don't sit on a wall if you're an egg’ with the Value Position, ‘children can be eggs’. In turn, this tables the bond ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies children can be eggs’, which wrinkles against its implicated counterpart and is deferred through laughter. This patterning of challenge and disalignment is repeated in the last segment of the analysis presented here: Turns 11e13 (Table 10). Here the comedian introduces another Persona, glossed here as ‘egg’. Responding to the adult's abbreviated repetition of the moral, “don't sit on a wall”, the egg isolates the occurrence figure of a person speaking to an egg and construes it as the Value Position that eggs are capable of understanding language. The egg then rejects this position through a series of contract: disclaim: deny moves: “I can't hear you”, “I've got nothing”, “I've got no ears”. Again we can see how by construing projected Personae in dialogue, the comedian is able to link his interpretation of the Humpty Dumpty moral to a specific Value Position: ‘eggs can hear; eggs have ears’. This then tables a ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies eggs can understand language’ bond, which sustains the higher-level deferred bond ‘Humpty Dumpty moral is absurd’ and is laughed off by the audience.

12 Reflecting the comedian's comment earlier in the text describing the social functions of nursery rhymes as to convey moral messages to children by encoding dominant social values of the culture: “I think everything is charged with politics and morality and the way to live um it's in everything fables nursery rhymes, little sayings” [42:50 e 43:00]. 13 We can theorise that the modalisation and choice of subjective voice in “I can” are tools used to calibrate the tension created between the tabled bond and implicated bond; a more forceful statement might risk rupturing the tension and crossing into transgressive territory where the audience is unable to defer the tabled bond. 14 We are here using the updated notation of ‘occurrence’ for the ideational entity at the discourse semantic stratum as per (Hood & Hao, forthcoming).

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Table 10 Analysis of excerpt 1: ‘egg’.

Verbiage (arranged in turns according to Persona and Value posion)

1.

How is that applicable to five-year-olds

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 2. I have never worked out the moral to Humpty Dumpty AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 3. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again” 4. All I can think is “don’t sit on a wall if you’re an egg”

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 5. But again how is that applicable to a five-yearold human AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 6. I mean you tell that to a group of [five-year-olds] 7. “so don't sit on a wall if you’re an egg” 8.

“what do you mean ‘if I’m an egg’” I’m not an egg”

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 9. It doesn't make sense

10. “If I mean none of us are eggs”

11. If there was an egg there it wouldn’t make sense cos you’d go to the egg 12. “don't sit on a wall”

13. “I’m an egg I can’t hear you I’ve got nothing I’ve got no ears” AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

ENGAGEMENT:

ENGAGEMENT:

Authorial voice

Projected voice Persona resource

Value posion targeted

contract: disclaim: deny

Jack and Jill moral is applicable to children

contract: disclaim: deny

HD Moral makes sense

expand: entertain

HD moral is: “don’t sit on a wall if you’re an egg”

contract: disclaim: deny

HD moral is applicable to children

expand: aribute: acknowledge expand: aribute: acknowledge expand: aribute: acknowledge contract: disclaim: deny expand: aribute: acknowledge contract: disclaim deny expand: aribute: acknowledge expand: aribute: ackowledge

Adult

Child

Child

contract: disclaim: deny contract: disclaim: deny contract: disclaim: deny

Sing on wall is good if you’re an egg Children can be eggs

Bonds tabled and deferred in comedianaudience affiliaon β α Primary encapsulated encapsulated bond bond bond Nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children Nursery rhyme morals are difficult to understand

HD moral implies children can be eggs

Children can be eggs

HD Moral makes sense Child

contract: disclaim deny

Children can be eggs

HD moral implies children can be eggs

HD Moral makes sense Adult

Egg

contract: disclaim: deny contract: disclaim: deny

Sing on wall is good if you’re an egg Eggs can hear; eggs have ears

HD moral implies eggs can understand language

HD moral is absurd

Nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children

HD moral is absurd

Nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children

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A second excerpt from the text further demonstrates how dialogic resources can be used to specify Value Positions and position Personae in relation to them. The analysis in Table 11 shows how in turns 2e10 the comedian sets up opposing Value Positions linked to the b bond ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies horses can mend eggs’. The comedian repeatedly construes an unspecified Persona that aligns with these Value Positions and then reverts to the authorial voice to reject them. For each negotiation, the deferred bond is linked to an absurd Value Position, serially charging tension as it wrinkles against the implicated bond, ‘Humpty Dumpty moral does not imply horses can mend eggs’ and discharging it through laughter. Table 11 Analysis of excerpt 2: ‘horses’.

Verbiage (arranged in turns according to Persona and Value posion)

1.

Don't send send a horse a delicate an egg

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 2. “We've got a cracked egg shall we send a horse” 3.

Definitely not

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 4. Have you got a doctor or someone who works for Fabergé

5.

Don’t

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 6. “We’ve we’vewe’ve got like a half a ton creature with no fingers” 7. No

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 8. Don't send that

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER 9. “Got a four-legged thing with like a” 10.

11.

No nono chance

They can't They [couldn’t] put on [gloves] They couldn't scrub up AUDIENCE LAUGHTER

ENGAGEMENT:

ENGAGEMENT:

Authorial voice

Projected voice Persona resource

contract: disclaim: deny

expand: aribute: acknowledge

Value posion targeted

A horse can mend an egg

Unspecified

expand: entertain

A horse can mend an egg

Bonds tabled and deferred in comedianaudience affiliaon β α Primary encapsulated encapsulated bond bond bond HD moral HD moral is Nursery implies horses absurd rhyme can mend morals eggs are not relevant to children

contract: disclaim: deny expand: entertain

A doctor or someone who works for Fabergé can mend an egg A horse can mend an egg

contract: disclaim: deny

expand: aribute: acknowledge

Unspecified

expand: entertain

contract: disclaim: deny contract: disclaim: deny expand: aribute: acknowledge contract: disclaim: deny contract: disclaim: deny

A like a half a ton creature with no fingers can mend an egg

A horse can mend an egg

Unspecified

expand: entertain

A four-legged thing can mend an egg A four-legged thing can mend an egg A horse can prepare for surgery

HD moral implies horses can mend eggs

HD moral is absurd

Nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children

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The analysis presented above illustrates how dialogic resources are employed in this text to argue individual Value Positions from differing perspectives among Personae, with projected dialogue serving to re-construe positions and table these as bonds for the audience to respond to. A further observation that emerges from this analysis is how the bonds tabled interrelate, with the first bond of ‘nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children’ acting as a primary, umbrella bond within which subsequent bonds are encapsulated. There is a logical relationship between the encapsulated and primary bonds, most clearly visible in the later turns of Table 10. The b encapsulated bonds ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies children can be eggs’ and ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies eggs are animate’ occupy a relation of consequential conjunction (Martin and Rose, 2007, p. 127) which could be glossed as ‘therefore’ with a bond, ‘Humpty Dumpty moral is absurd’. This relationship is repeated between the a bond and the primary bond, ‘Nursery rhyme morals are not relevant for children’, and as Table 10 and shows, this primary bond is sustained by all of the bonds tabled in the excerpt. The interaction of dialogic resources with the hierarchical layering of bonds would thus also seem to play an important role in how the comedian navigates his own stance towards the bonds under negotiation, as well as manoeuvring the audience so as to heighten the tension between wrinkling bonds while encouraging a humorous response. Note the progression from the comedian's initial interpretation of the Humpty Dumpty moral in Table 10 as “don't sit on a wall if you're an egg”, to the projected egg's rejection of the Value Position ‘eggs are capable of understanding language’. Across this stretch of text we can see that the intensity of the absurdity, and therefore of the tension between tabled and implicated bonds, has grown. Thus, while we might envisage that the negotiation of a bond such as ‘nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children’ could form part of a sober conversation on the subject, a bond such as ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies children can be eggs’ has strayed into the realm of the absurd. Indeed, the sequencing of tabled bonds from primary to a and b encapsulated bonds evokes the argumentation of reductio ad absurdum. As such, it is possible that this is itself a recurring feature of humorous affiliation in stand-up comedy, or even a technique consciously deployed by comedians. In terms of affiliation, this progression exerts a tacit pressure on the audience to defer bonds that in isolation might have met with confusion or even rejection,15 as once a primary bond has been deferred, logic suggests the bonds it encapsulates must be reacted to in the same way. The comedian thus anchors the affiliative space with an early invitation to defer e but not reject e a non-threatening bond such as ‘nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children’ while communing around the shared bond ‘nursery rhyme morals are relevant for children’. He then uses dialogic resources to extrapolate the deferred bond into a series of increasingly absurd, unshareable bonds that progressively stretch the limit of the audience's deferral limit. Caught in the ‘trap’ engineered by this faux-logic (which is only considered non-threatening by the audience because of the conventions of the stand-up comedy genre), the audience must continuously attempt to reconcile newly tabled bonds with its deferral of the initial bond. Forced to acknowledge the ever-greater immiscibility between the two (culminating, perhaps, in the comedian's suggestion that a logical reading of the Humpty Dumpty moral implies that even one horse with minor medical training would be preferable to sending “all the king's horses” to mend an egg [51:52]), the audience resolves these waves of tension by laughing them off as humour. 6. Conclusion This paper has demonstrated how analysing dialogic resources involved in affiliation can contribute to understanding the interactional humour occurring in stand-up comedy. In particular, these results highlight the dialogic complexity involved as the comedian employs projected dialogue to interrogate and re-interpret Value Positions and thus table bonds that wrinkle but don't violate the putative values of the audience. Circling back to stand-up comedy's role of social commentary, these bonds in tension might signal a culture's inconstant treatment of texts such as nursery rhymes across different contexts and genres, with the comedian's jokes serving to highlight this paradox. A fruitful future avenue of enquiry in this area would be to explore whether negotiations of bonds affect how interactants subsequently view the bonds in question16; would the audience in this text be more likely to share a ‘Humpty Dumpty moral is absurd’ or even a ‘Nursery rhyme morals are not relevant to children’ bond after leaving the performance? This may even yield a new affiliation strategy to be accommodated in the model, accounting for instances where texts modify and shape interactants' individual and community identities. A phylogenetic scope such as this would undoubtedly enhance the explanatory power of the SFL affiliation model, albeit while undoubtedly posing numerous fresh challenges. The analysis of even two small excerpts of a stand-up comedy text reveals how the negotiation of social bonds via positioning Personae around Value Positions offers a valuable lens through which to explore humour and furthers our understanding of how social semiosis is unfolding in humorous discourse. The SFL discourse analysis framework has allowed us to link fine-grained, lexico-grammatical coding with discourse semantic and even contextual factors so as to present a holistic account of how a number of semogenic resources are participating in a humorous text. Especially valuable is the possibility of tracking the interaction between a comedian's authorial voice and projected Personae as they negotiate Value Positions, and then being able to collapse these resources down to the sum total of their affiliative valeur. Accordingly, we can unpack a single utterance: “what do you mean, ‘if I'm an egg?’” (Turn 8, Table 10) as projected speech, coded as the dialogic coupling

15 Consider if in Turn 4, having recited the lyrics to Humpty Dumpty, the comedian had suggested the moral implies eggs are capable of understanding language. 16 c.f. configurational theories of humour (Keith-Spiegel, 1972).

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[child: deny/children can be eggs]. In light of the projected co-text, we can see how this coupling tables a bond of ‘Humpty Dumpty moral implies children can be eggs’, which in turn sustains higher order bonds established earlier in the text. In comparison with work in the broader field of interactional humour studies exploring dialogic resources such as Glick (2007), this approach can assist in clarifying exactly how a comedian is recruiting projected Personae to navigate their own alignment to Value Positions. For instance, in his analysis of a stand-up comedy text similarly rich in projected voices, Glick observes that the multiply foregrounded, dialogic characterization of… two fictionalized entities is arguably humorous because it is in line with contemporary critical ideologies of colonialism which [the comedian] both guides the audience to through humor and which he had reason to assume they already knew and were amenable to politically (2007, p.299). While Glick argues his interpretation convincingly, neither his analytical framework for coding semiotic resources nor his model for interactional humour provide as much detail as SFL affiliation theory does, and thus his conclusions are more speculative and less easily applied to similar texts. An SFL analysis, on the other hand, furnishes a robust empirical foundation for conclusions drawn from results. This is not a unilateral criticism of approaches such as Glick's but an observation that the two methodologies are complementary and can be employed for different kinds of analysis. Conversely, SFL's tendency towards close analysis of relatively short stretches of text and technical density may render it unsuited for certain avenues of research. The results presented in this paper are encouraging, however they are only a first step towards a cartography of how affiliation unfolds across semogenic resources in stand-up comedy discourse. Among many others points, it opens the way for the exploration of how the sequencing of a comedic performance reflects dialogic patterns in affiliation, with bonds being tabled, negotiated, and renegotiated repeatedly throughout. It also may be of value in exploring other genres where dialogic resources interact with humour, such as political speeches, theatrical texts and even humorous literature. One area only glancingly touched on in this paper, but of urgent importance, is the semiotic role of paralinguistic resources. For a genre such as stand-up comedy, where the comedian often relies solely on verbal and body language, an analytical framework that accounts for the semiotic potential of gesture and phonology is crucial. Accordingly, the analysis of spoken language presented in this paper would no doubt be substantially enriched by an accompanying paralinguistic analysis. Recent progress on an SFL model for this region of semiosis (see Martin and Zappavigna, (2019), Hao and Hood (2019) and Ngo (2018)) offers a promising point of departure for this avenue of research. Beyond this, the method for annotating bonds based on couplings construed in text still requires development and formalising. More ambitiously, the redundancy between the dynamic of tabled and implicated bonds in the SFL theory of affiliation, and projected or implied voices construed through dialogic resources, would benefit from reconciliation or even integration. A renovated model that incorporates both these systems would offer a more internally consistent, streamlined analytical framework. References Aarons, D., Mierowsky, M., 2017. How to do things with jokes: speech acts in standup comedy. Eur J Humour Res 5 (4), 158e168. https://doi.org/10.7592/ EJHR2017.5.4.aarons. Attardo, S., 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York. Attardo, S., Raskin, V., 1991. 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The Linguistic Construction of Business Reasoning: towards a Language-Based Model of Decision-Making in Undergraduate Business. White, P.R.R., 1998. Telling Media Tales: the News Story as Rhetoric. University of Sydney, Sydney. White, P.R.R., 2001. An Introductory Course in Appraisal Analysis. Unpublished manuscript (word processor version). Retrieved September 20, 2007 from. http://www.grammatics.com/appraisal. Zappavigna, M., 2011. Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media Soc. 13 (5), 788e806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385097. Zappavigna, M., 2012. Discourse of Twitter and social media: How we use language to create affiliation on the web. A&C Black. Zappavigna, M., 2014a. Enacting identity in microblogging through ambient affiliation. Discourse Commun. 8 (2), 209e228. Zappavigna, M., 2014b. Coffeetweets: bonding around the bean on Twitter. In: The Language of Social Media. Springer, pp. 139e160. Zappavigna, M., 2018. Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse. Bloomsbury Publishing. Zappavigna, M., Martin, J.R., 2018. #Communing affiliation: Social tagging as a resource for aligning around values in social media. Discourse Context Media 22, 4e12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.08.001. Zhao, S., 2011. Learning through Multimedia Interaction: the Construal of Primary Social Science Knowledge in Web-Based Digital Learning Materials. Dissertation/Thesis (Retrieved from). Lorenzo Logi is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, and is employing Systemic Functional Linguistics to research the social semiosis occurring in stand-up comedy performances. He completed his Master's in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sydney in 2017, writing his dissertation on bonding and affiliation in television sitcoms. Michele Zappavigna is a senior lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Her major research interest is the discourse of social media and ambient affiliation. Recent books include: Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media Metadiscourse (Bloomsbury, 2018), Discourse of Twitter and Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2012), Researching the Language of Social Media (Routledge, 2014; with Ruth Page, Johann Unger and David Barton), and Discourse and Diversionary Justice: An Analysis of Ceremonial Redress in Youth Justice Conferencing (Palgrave, 2018; with J.R. Martin).