How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures

Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1361–1385 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures Catherine Evans Davies Department of English, University of Alabama, 103 Morgan Hall, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA Received 1 June 2001; received in revised form 20 October 2002

Abstract An approach to humor grounded in interactional sociolinguistics starts not with reified abstractions such as ‘humor’, ‘wit’, or ‘irony’ but rather with the situated interpretation of joking as a speech activity. Using videotaped data of crosscultural conversation groups, and employing a close linguistic analysis based in Gumperz’s theory of conversational inference, this paper documents the ability of beginning language learners to collaborate in the construction of conversational joking discourse with native English speakers. The claim is made that communication is achieved indirectly within these jointly-constructed joking episodes through displaying understanding by playing within the frame set out by the other. Such finetuning of understanding is the core of why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport. Illustrative joking episodes represent differences along several dimensions: the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, with examples of primary reliance on the nonverbal and lexical, on the prosodic, and on the pragmatic; the interactional roles of the native English speaker and learner(s), with examples of different patterns of initiation and collaboration; and the focus of the joking within the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience, in effect, the culture of the language learner, with examples highlighting the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions, the difficulty of coping with interaction in the new language, and the general powerlessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Discourse; Humor; Joking; Conversation; Crosscultural communication; Language socialization; Interactional sociolinguistics

E-mail address: [email protected] (C. E. Davies). 0378-2166/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00181-9

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1. Introduction Humor represents an important theoretical challenge within the discipline of linguistics because it forces us to confront non-literal and obviously multi-functional uses of language. It also challenges approaches to discourse analysis which are reductionistic and unidimensional, ignoring phenomenological shifts of key, problematic boundaries of units, multifunctionality of utterances, constellations of cues at different linguistic levels, layering of social meaning, and embeddedness in context. Humor is also important theoretically as a component of a basic construct in applied linguistics, viz., ‘communicative competence’.1 Much research in applied linguistics focuses on identifying what this construct entails, and then exploring how to help language learners achieve it. We seek to understand how interlocutors, especially those from different cultural backgrounds, accomplish (or fail to accomplish) ‘conversational involvement’, a core aspect of communicative competence. For Americans, joking is a significant manifestation of conversational involvement, because it represents an important way in which rapport is developed and maintained. Even though joking, as a linguistic and interactional process, appears to be a universal human phenomenon, it is more obviously embedded than most communication in situated sociocultural context. An approach to humor grounded in interactional sociolinguistics starts not with reified abstractions such as ‘humor’, ‘wit’, or ‘irony’, (cf. Alexander, 1997; Barbe, 1995; Clift, 1999),2 but rather with the situated interpretation of joking as a speech activity (cf. Davies, 1986; Norrick, 1993; Tannen, 1984). Using richly contextualized recordings of interaction, such an approach seeks to understand how interactants signal shifts of footing into and out of joking frames, how the joking frames are constructed, how interactants display understanding of the joking, and how multiple levels of social meaning are conveyed through the joking. It becomes an empirical question whether the interaction would be best analyzed using definitions or techniques of ‘humor’, ‘wit’, ‘irony’, etc., to the extent that a consensus exists in these areas (cf. Attardo, 1994), or whether some other approach is more appropriate (cf. Kotthoff’s, 1998, ‘‘staged intertextuality’’). Collaborative, or what I originally called ‘‘joint’’ joking (Davies, 1984), seems to me to be the ultimate locus of conversational involvement, a key notion within Gumperz’s theory of conversational inference. In joking collaboratively, interactants necessarily display how finely tuned they are to each other. This is consistent with Brown and Levinson’s (1987) classification of the strategy ‘joke’ under ‘positive politeness’, which is oriented toward solidarity and affiliation through establishing common ground. Collaborative joking interaction is also arguably the most complex 1

See Hymes (1972a) for original formulation of the concept of ‘communicative competence’, and Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983), Savignon (1983), and Celce-Murcia (1995) for elaboration, respectively. See Davies (1987a,b, 1989a,b) and Vega (1990) for application to humor. 2 I do not mean to suggest that Barbe (1995), Alexander (1997), and Clift (1999) are not concerned with interaction in context; what I want to emphasize is that each of them starts from one of the reifications, gets caught in definitions, and then either explores a range of interaction classifiable under the reification (Barbe and Alexander), or uses examples of interaction in context to challenge current assumptions and definitions (Clift) but still works within a definitional framework.

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form of communication that we engage in routinely; this interaction is also the most ‘situated’ in its interpretation. Given these characterizations of collaborative joking activity, it might seem that the last place we would expect to find it practiced would be among beginning language learners interacting with native speakers. Using videotaped data of cross-cultural conversation groups, and employing a close linguistic analysis based in Gumperz’s theory of conversational inference (Gumperz, 1982a, 1989a,b), which demonstrates both the interdependence of linguistic levels (Long and Sato, 1984) and the achievement of coordinated joint action across cultures,3 this paper documents the ability of beginning language learners to collaborate in the construction of conversational joking discourse with native English speakers. Learners are able to exploit the limited gamut of sociolinguistic resources available to them within a discourse context in which the native speaker provides important support, which, extending the construction metaphor, can be referred to as a kind of scaffolding.4 The claim is made in this paper that communication is achieved indirectly within these jointly-constructed joking episodes through displaying understanding by playing within the frame set out by the other. This is the core reason why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport: as a specialized form of ‘involvement’,5 it reveals the fine-tuning of understanding. Joking episodes were selected to represent differences in joking along several dimensions. The first dimension is the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, with examples representing primary reliance on the nonverbal and lexical, on the prosodic, and on the pragmatic. The second dimension is the interactional roles of the native English speaker and learner(s), with examples representing initiation by native speaker with collaboration by learner, of initiation by learner with collaboration by native speaker but also extensive collaboration by other learners, and of initiation by learner with the native speaker providing only the original discourse context. The final dimension is the focus of the joking within the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience; in effect, this dimension represents the culture of the language learner. The examples highlight the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions, the difficulty of coping with interaction in the new language, and the general powerlessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers. A hard reality of language learning is that full participation in joking with native speakers—of the spontaneous sort which is so important in American society— requires a high level of communicative competence. This is true because humor is deeply embedded in cultural context (cf. Apte, 1985), a partially submerged structure of sociocultural knowledge in the form of schemas, associations, assumptions, and presuppositions linked to discourse, the tip of which is a carefully crafted 3

See especially Erickson and Shultz (1982) for an analysis of ‘interactional synchrony’ which refers to the rhythmic coordination of interaction between people with similar ethnic backgrounds. 4 Slobin (1982) uses the term ‘‘scaffolding’’ with reference to first language acquisition; see also Bruner (1981). 5 See Gumperz (1982a), Chafe (1982), and especially Tannen (1989: 9–35) for a discussion of this concept.

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utterance. This linguistic manifestation must be artfully fashioned because the listener’s attention needs to be directed very precisely in order suddenly to reveal the submerged structure.6 The artful utterance triggers, through a constellation of what Gumperz terms ‘‘contextualization cues’’ at all levels of linguistic organization in the discourse context, a carefully channeled process of inference which must be worked out by the listener. The utterance simultaneously establishes a frame,7 with characteristics that represent potential options for responding. Thus the challenge to the language learner in learning to participate fully in conversational joking is not only to acquire the appropriate sociocultural knowledge, but also to achieve an appropriate level of interpretive and productive expertise. A hidden reality, apparently undocumented up to this point, is the fact that—given the appropriate circumstances—even beginning English learners are able to initiate and participate in joking behavior with each other and Americans.

2. An analysis of an example of joking between native speakers To illustrate what is meant by conversational joking (cf. Norrick, 1993, 2002), and to make clear that we are not dealing with ‘canned’ narrative jokes, which require other kinds of communicative competence, I will offer an analysis of an example of a joking episode between two native speakers of English from an American subculture famous for its brand of humor. This instance is notable in that part of the shared discourse context took a visible form. I was the addressee and initially unwitting (and unwitty) collaborator in the following joking episode, which occurred on a recent visit to New York City. While I was waiting for the bus on Fifth Avenue with a collection of people including a diminutive older woman who had drawn my attention briefly, because I had realized that she was more appropriately dressed than I for early spring bus travel in New York City, my gaze fell on a sign just beyond the bus stop area. It was a standard rectangular metal traffic sign, affixed to a standard signpost, and it read, with the phrases lined up in parallel from the top to the bottom of the sign: ‘‘NO PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING, NO KIDDING’’. My face must have registered first amazement and then amusement as I took in this ‘only in New York’ phenomenon, although I was unaware of being observed. Then my gaze moved down to a paper notice, also official, that had been taped to the post just below the permanent sign; this paper sign read, ‘‘NO PARKING ON SATURDAY’’. As I was bemusedly trying to calculate the composite message of the juxtaposed signs, I heard an older woman’s voice, with a New York accent, say, ‘‘I wonder what they do on Saturday’’, but with unusually strong nuclear stress8 on the first syllable of ‘‘Saturday’’. I knew that the utterance was addressed to me because it broke in on 6 See Chafe (1984) for a discussion of how speakers focus listeners’ attention, and Fry (1963) and Attardo (1994) for discussions of conversational jokes from a cognitive perspective. 7 See Bateson (1972) and Goffman (1974); Tannen (1993) discusses the application of the notion of ‘frame’ within different traditions. See also Clark (1996: 353) for a related discussion of ‘‘layering’’. Note that the term is also compatible with the construction metaphor introduced initially. 8 Greatest emphasis and highest pitch within the prosodic unit—here the whole utterance.

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my thoughts at exactly the moment at which I was trying to compute the answer to the question she posed. I looked in the direction of the voice and met the woman’s gaze, and I don’t remember exactly whether I just laughed appreciatively or also said something like ‘‘yeah, that’s what I’m wondering’’, with nuclear stress on ‘‘I’m’’. The woman had obviously been watching me read and react to these signs, and when she saw that I was starting to try to sort out what must have been intended by New York officialdom, she had produced a carefully crafted and timed utterance, which depended on the shared discourse context of the two signs with attendant sociocultural background knowledge. She manipulated syntax to pose a question, which highlighted for me the absurd interpretation that on Saturday parking is forbidden but standing, stopping, and kidding are permitted. In the syntactic context of a repetition of the phrase ‘‘no parking’’ with ‘‘on Saturday’’ appended, by ending her utterance with the word ‘‘Saturday’’, and producing a stronger than usual nuclear stress on the first syllable of the word, she created a contrastive stress. The contrast invoked by this prosodic cue was a world in which Saturday is set apart from all of the other days of the week on which standing, stopping, and kidding are also forbidden. In addition, the juxtaposition of the negations in ‘‘no parking’’ and ‘‘no parking on Saturday’’ serves simultaneously to reinforce the idea that parking is forbidden on Saturday,9 and also potentially to cancel out the negations on standing, stopping, and kidding, since those prohibitions are not repeated. A sardonic tone of voice and deadpan delivery conveyed to me the world-weary camaraderie of the New Yorker (in which I felt privileged to be included), in which we all commiserate in our existential dilemma of living at the mercy of a Kafkaesque urban bureaucracy (cf. Coser, 1959; Freud, 1928). By breaking in on my train of thought in such an artful way she, in effect, ‘read my mind’ and spoke my thoughts for me, demonstrating what could be thought of as a cognitive form of empathy.10 Such an interactive move would be highly intrusive if it were experienced as inappropriately personal or intimate. But the pragmatic subtlety of her utterance gave me a series of interpretive options: to accept it as my own thought as if I had uttered it myself, to acknowledge it as an accurate representation of my own thought, to treat it as a question and respond to it, or to ignore it by pretending that I hadn’t heard her or that it wasn’t addressed to me. The woman’s choice of syntactic form for her utterance was thus also a finely-tuned response to the social context in which we found ourselves. The utterance was a statement (‘‘I wonder what they do on Saturday’’) which conventionally conveys a question indirectly.11 This conventional indirectness gives the addressee the option of non-response, but also sets up the expectation of a response in the mind of the addressee/listener, just as a direct question would. Given the public setting among strangers, she probably chose not to use a direct question because it would have been intrusive. A question, especially a direct question such as in this case, ‘‘What 9 It has also been pointed out to me that there is another interpretation of the sign/utterance: on Saturdays the prohibition is reinforced. What do they do on Saturdays that would require reinforcing the prohibition?? 10 See Brown and Levinson (1987) for a theoretical framework for modes of politeness. 11 See Athanasiadou (1991) on the discourse function of questions.

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do they do on Saturday?’’, when addressed to another person sets up the expectation of a response which will serve as an answer, and is thus potentially interpersonally impertinent.12 Thus the woman’s choice of grammatical form with its accompanying pragmatic interpretive options shows the complex social demands that jokers must respond to in terms of production and interpretation. This example also offers the opportunity to illustrate different kinds of response to and collaboration in the joking activity itself. The simplest would be a laugh, supposedly indicating ‘getting’ the joke and being willing to acknowledge that fact. The laugh thus offers minimal information as to actual understanding (or even concerning whether what the listener is laughing at is what the joker intended), but is interpersonally cooperative in that it acknowledges the communicative intent (namely to joke) of the initiator of the joking episode (cf. Jefferson, 1979). The framing of the interaction as humorous has been acknowledged, but that is the only characteristic of the interpretive frame that has been addressed. It is a cooperative response but not truly a collaboration. The next step, which begins to approach collaboration, would be to respond (with or without laughter) using more of the characteristics of the humor frame as set out by the initiator, in effect to build on the potential scaffolding offered. To illustrate from my response above, (a laugh and the utterance ‘‘yeah, that’s what I’m wondering’’), in such a response I am closely following the linguistic characteristics laid out by the initiator. I use the same verb (‘‘wonder’’), and linguistically link back and therefore incorporate the main clause of the initiator’s utterance ‘‘what they do on Saturday’’ by means of the pronouns ‘‘that’’ and ‘‘what’’. In terms of the pragmatic structure of the utterance, I place the pronouns referring to the previous utterance in initial, ‘‘topic’’ position by means of a syntactic cleft structure, thereby signaling that shared knowledge here is the previous utterance, to which I am adding a ‘comment’’ (additional information). Repeating another’s choice of words can be a powerful means of signaling acknowledgment; moreover, in this case I am mirroring the prosodic form of the initiator’s utterance in that I also produce a contrastive stress. I am thus confirming, by virtually repeating, the initiator’s utterance. The next step in collaboration would be to come up with something different while still clearly matching characteristics of the frame as set out by the joking initiator; an example might be for me to have said, ‘‘well obviously they stand, stop, and kid’’, perhaps maintaining the same deadpan expression as the initiator. In this case, I would be drawing more directly on the shared context of the signs, using the words of the signs but manipulating them syntactically and morphologically, and maintaining the sardonic mock serious stance in which all absurd things are possible and indeed probable—but shifting to the role of ‘question-answerer’. A further step in collaboration would be to extend the principles of the joking frame in some way; I might have said, ‘‘well I don’t know, but I think I’ll come back on Saturday and find out!’’ in which, instead of collaborating in the sardonic New Yorker pose, I switch and take on a self-parodying role of the naive tourist who wants to see everything, in 12 The only exceptions are questions concerning what are considered ‘free goods’ (Goffman, 1971), such as the correct time.

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the process moving beyond repetition or manipulation of linguistic material as given by the shared context, including the signs and the joker’s utterance. Witty forms of such collaboration, or ‘repartee’, are exemplified by Dorothy Parker’s response to ‘‘age before beauty’’ as she preceded the initiator through the door: ‘‘pearls before swine’’ (McPhee, 1978).13 More mundane forms can be seen in such exchanges as ‘‘Working hard? ... Hardly working’’, in which the linguistic manipulation within the frame is very obvious (cf. Norrick, 1984) for discussion of ‘‘stock conversational witticisms’’). Of course one could also argue that the true initiator of the joking was the traffic sign. The sign is itself a joke structure, artfully framed syntactically; the final prohibition, ‘‘NO KIDDING’’, because it appears to be syntactically parallel to all of the preceding phrases (‘‘NO PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING’’), channels interpretation in such a way that it leads the reader to assume that the message is also cognitively parallel. In fact, ‘‘NO KIDDING’’ has two possible underlying syntactic structures: whereas the other phrases mean ‘‘You must not park,’’ and one possible interpretation of ‘‘no kidding’’ is ‘‘you must not kid,’’ the conventional interpretation of ‘‘No Kidding’’ is as having an underlying structure in the first person, i.e., ‘I am not kidding’’. Thus it is a metacomment on the previous discourse (‘‘and I am serious in my prohibitions against parking, standing, and stopping’’) and thus on a different logical level (cf. Bateson, 1972). In addition to violating register expectations for the discourse of signs, this conventional interpretation personalizes the ultimately impersonal (a traffic sign) by appearing to make it speak for itself. If we take this perspective, then it was the sign that initiated the joking, and I responded non-verbally, and the woman played within the frame, and then I collaborated further within the frame. A further essential theoretical formulation, which attempts to account for the phenomenological shift, which takes place at the point of initiation of the joking, is that of ‘footing’.14 Goffman’s term, defined as ‘‘the alignment we take up to ourselves and the others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance’’ (Goffman, 1981: 128), implies a different stance toward the interaction on the part of the initiator, which may or may not then be taken up by the other participants. It is a shift in interpretive frame, which constitutes a shift in phenomenological context (cf. Bateson, 1972; Gumperz, 1982a; Schu¨tz, 1967). In that moment, there is a movement from the world of the ordinary conversation into a world of play or ‘non-seriousness’ (cf. Raskin’s, 1985, ‘‘non-bona fide’’), which of course some communicators use in some circumstances as a means of conveying serious messages in a conventionally deniable way (‘‘But I was only kidding; can’t you take a joke?’’).15 For Americans, who use the form of linguistic play known as joking a great deal in informal interaction, on my analysis (Davies, 1987b), the 13

Freud discusses such an exchange as an example of what he calls ‘‘unification’’ (Freud, 1905/1960: 66–70). This concept is most extensively dealt with in Goffman (1981); Hymes (1972b) coins the term ‘‘key’’ for a similar notion. Goffman’s term seems to me to be compatible with the ‘construction’ metaphor we have been following. 15 See Labov and Fanshel (1977) for discussion of the need for deniability within a human communication system. 14

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speech activity itself conveys social meaning; it signals a particular style of politeness which emphasizes commonality and closeness among people.16 Phenomenologically speaking, what is important is the shift in footing, and the content of the joking may be backgrounded. Because of the social meaning of the shift in footing, in effect a shift in phenomenological context, simply being able to recognize what is happening and respond in some even rudimentary way is very important. Responding means playing within the same frame or extending it in some recognizable way as described above. We have seen that conversational joking is a specialized joint activity in which there is neither a predetermined script (in the sense of Raskin, 1985 for narrative jokes), nor conventional routines (as in ‘ritual insult’ exchanges analyzed by Labov, 1972, nor even necessarily the ‘stock conversational witticisms’ identified by Norrick, 1984). Rather, conversational joking is a potentially open-ended set of characteristics of the frame from which the participants must select in order to display understanding.17 The joking proceeds according to a matching of selected characteristics (e.g., lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic), as well as interactional rhythm. In the interaction between native speakers of English which was discussed extensively above, this characterization of conversational joking is illustrated not only in the analysis of what actually was said, but also by examining other possible responses which demonstrate the idea of a set of principles which could have been drawn upon to continue the joking footing (for discussion of ‘paradigm shifts’ as part of play, see Farrer, 1981). Thus the effective use of language in joking involves an artful and economical utterance which makes fullest use of the interdependence of linguistic levels, and which depends crucially upon, and as such carries implicitly with it, a wealth of sociocultural background knowledge. The verbal art of this specialized joint activity most closely resembles jazz in the world of music.

3. Language learning In most general terms, the perspective taken here on language learning is that it is not the cumulative memorization of vocabulary items and grammar rules, but is (or should be) primarily a socialization process. Within this process, which by definition occurs with native speakers of the language, collaborative discourse has an important role. This is true not only for children learning a first language (cf. Bruner, 1981; Ochs et al., 1979; Slobin, 1982), but also in the second language learning of adults (Long and Sato, 1984; McLaughlin, 1987). The basic idea is that the native speaker helps the learner to construct discourse, with the metaphor carried forward in the use of the term scaffolding. Conversational joking is a key place where collaborative discourse is being produced, with scaffolding involving various dimensions

16 See Lakoff (1975): ‘‘camaraderie’’; Brown and Levinson (1987): ‘‘positive politeness’’; Scollon and Scollon (1981): ‘‘solidarity politeness’’. 17 Sacks (1972) discusses a similar phenomenon as a form of response to stories.

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of the discourse. In the example of conversational joking between native speakers discussed above, the response ‘‘Yeah, that’s what I’m wondering’’ was shown to build on the prosodic, syntactic, and pragmatic scaffolding provided by the comment, ‘‘I wonder what they do on Saturday’’. Further, developing communicative competence in this situation involves learning not only the forms of language, but when and how to use those forms appropriately. Thus within Celce-Murcia’s (1995) framework, grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and pragmatic competence are all drawn upon. Learners need to develop the ability to recognize when a joking footing has been initiated, and then to collaborate as they are able, with contributions ranging anywhere from a minimal, appropriate response to a developed joint production. Two other forms of linguistic joint activity, to provide a comparison, are ritualized everyday conversation and ‘duetting’ (Falk, 1979) defined as the joint recounting of a story based on shared experience. In the case of ritualized everyday conversation, the key dimension of communicative competence involved in participating effectively might be sociocultural schematic knowledge. In the case of ‘duetting’, the key dimensions might be knowledge of narrative schemas and of syntax. For participating effectively in conversational joking the key dimension of communicative competence might be characterized as a sensitive awareness of the process of interaction which allows quick perception of a mutual focus of attention and shared context, in effect, a shared culture in a microcosm that the joker may then refer to. In addition, learners need to learn the social meaning of the behavior in the new cultural context, and to come to terms with their own cultural attitudes about joking behavior as appropriate in particular contexts and inappropriate in others. It appears to be the case that different norms exist for appropriate contexts for joking (cf. Davies, 1989a), and that American joking behavior yields judgments cross-culturally about Americans as lacking seriousness. Given the view of language learning just presented, and given the kinds of knowledge and skills identified as important in joking, the typical language classroom cannot provide the appropriate context. A key dimension of the social context in which Americans joke, is its informality and apparent lack of major power differences, although one could argue that the egalitarianism is often ‘fictive’ (Alford, 1981). No matter how informal or egalitarian an American teacher may try to be, the typical international student from a more authoritarian culture brings expectations and attitudes about appropriate roles of teacher and student that preclude establishing the necessary context (cf. Hofstede, 1986). The challenge for language learning is to create a context for learners in which the appropriate conditions obtain. And this brings us to the background on the data under consideration here.

4. The data The data analyzed are from peer conversation groups at an Intensive English Program. These groups are voluntary ongoing extra-class groups of typically about six participants of similar proficiency level, which offer learners an opportunity to

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chat in English with peers and a non-teacher, American student. A key feature of these groups is that, in contrast to a classroom context, they are informal and egalitarian. In order to try to maintain the contrast with classroom interaction, the groups do not meet in regular classrooms, attendance is not taken, and any sort of ‘language teaching’ behavior on the part of the American student is actively discouraged. Even though there are no official power differences, obviously there are significant differences in linguistic resources in that the American students are native speakers of English and the international students are English-learners (cf. Candlin, 1981). The American student participants, who were employed by the English Language Institute, met weekly with a faculty coordinator to develop cross-cultural awareness and communication skills (Davies, 1988). The examples analyzed in this paper were all taken from videotaped group sessions which occurred right at the end of the semester. Thus all of these groups had had approximately three months of at least two hours of contact per week in which to develop group rapport. The groups had been videotaped once before, at the beginning of the semester. Three different groups are represented, but all of the group sessions dealt with the same task, as represented by the discussion topic. Each group was to ‘reminisce’, with the general pedagogical intent of giving the learners an opportunity to reflect on the degree of progress that they had made in their learning of English. They were also encouraged to think in terms of the potential humor in their initial language-learner situation, a standard question asked by the American student being ‘Can you think of any funny things or misunderstandings that happened to you when you first arrived in the United States?’. The boundaries of the episodes were determined partly in order to try to capture the immediate discourse context surrounding a joking footing, as defined above, in which collaboration took place. The joking episodes were selected to represent differences in joking along several dimensions. The first dimension is the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, the second dimension is the interactional roles of the native English speaker and learner(s), and the final dimension is the focus of the joking within the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience, in effect, the culture of the language learner. The native languages represented among the English learners in these interactions are Arabic, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish and Thai. 4.1. The transcription The transcription format allows for representation of relevant nonverbal behavior (in the line above the transcription) for representation of all speakers’ utterances and vocalizations in relation to each other in real time (each line representing approximately the same unit of time from left to right) and for relevant prosodic markings (intonation contours drawn above the line, and/or nuclear stress indicated by underlining of syllable, with greater emphasis indicated by capitalized syllable). The following transcription of the joking interaction described above should make the conventions clear.

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(1) ================================= facing in B’s direction, deadpan 1 ————————————————————————— A: I wonder what they do on SAturday B: ================================= looks at A 2 ————————————————————————— A: B: hehheh yeah that’s what I’M wondering ================================= In the following examples, speakers are identified by their native language and by their gender, thus the English speakers are EF and EM, and I=Indonesian, S=Spanish, J=Japanese, F=French, A=Arabic and T=Thai. In example (2), below, we encounter a wordplay on an idiomatic expression based in metaphor,18 which is paralleled by a gestural component. In this extract, the native English speaker initiates a joking footing through a nonverbal display of understanding of a humorous anecdote told by the first English learner. The second learner builds further on the humor frame, which had been extended by the native English speaker and creates a new unidiomatic expression by analogy, taking the opposite of the metaphor (‘‘what’s down?’’) and expressing it simultaneously in verbal and nonverbal modes. The joking highlights the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions in language—a major problem for language learners. The joking episode is part of a broader discussion of what it was like for the learners when they first arrived in the United States. The native English speaker (EM) has asked for examples of funny things that happened in trying to communicate with Americans, and one of the Indonesian-speaking learners (IM1) is responding to the question. He talks about problems with what he calls ‘‘slang words’’, then narrowing that category to the example of the expression, ‘‘what’s up?’’ which he had not understood as a greeting when he first arrived. Thus IM1 has provided the humor frame through his anecdote. The previous discourse, in the form of the native English speaker’s question, has established a past time reference, but the learner switches from past (‘‘heard’’ in line 1) to present (‘‘ask’’ in line 3, and ‘‘I don’t know what’s that mean’’ also in line 3). The native English speaker skillfully interjects (line 4) an apparent check of understanding, ‘‘you didn’t know ‘what’s up?’’’—which serves simultaneously to repeat part of the learner’s utterance in the appropriate tense. The learner apparently picks up on that indirect correction, because he repeats it immediately, ‘‘yeah I didn’t know’’ (line 4). At this point the native English speaker (NES) initiates the joking footing by pointedly looking up in the air and chuckling. The learner has told of a funny misunderstanding, but he has communicated only that he didn’t know how to interpret 18

See Lakoff and Johnson (1980) for a cognitive linguistic treatment of metaphor.

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the expression ‘‘what’s up?’’. The native speaker chooses a plausible implicit interpretation, namely that the learner would have known the word ‘‘up’’ and thus only the literal meaning of the expression. The native speaker is showing non-verbally how he assumed the learner initially interpreted and reacted to the idiomatic expression. Another learner (JM) then repeats ‘‘what’s up’’ twice (line 5) while the others are chuckling, and looks up each time himself, imitating the native speaker. Then the storyteller, IM1, moves to the conclusion of his anecdote, providing some evaluation [in the wrong tense], (‘‘it’s very funny’’ in line 5) and a classic coda (‘‘now I know lots of slangs so it’s better for me’’ in lines 5 and 6), which brings the listener up to the present moment.19 JM, in the meantime, builds his own extension of joking within the principles of the frame, overlapping IM1 as he creates an unidiomatic expression by analogy, ‘‘what’s down?’’, as he looks down with an exaggerated head gesture. In this example, we see how the native English speaker provided scaffolding within the discourse context by posing a question, then repeating the key expression as part of a comprehension check, and then initiating the joking footing by nonverbally displaying the basis of the misunderstanding implied in the learner’s anecdote which had provided the humor frame. Another learner (JM) was able to then imitate the native speaker, and finally to extend the joking frame, using a basic semantic opposition involving very simple vocabulary (‘up/down’) and again drawing on the nonverbal mode. (2) ============================================= 1 ——————————————————————————————————— EM: mmhmm IM1: and also like ah s- I heard s- m- many s- slang slang words IM2: JM: SF1: SF2: ============================================= 2 ——————————————————————————————————— EM: IM1: you know ah like the first time like ah Americans Americans people IM2: JM: SF1: SF2: =============================================

19

See Labov and Waletzky (1967) for an analysis of the structure of oral narratives, including the concept of ‘evaluation’, i.e., how the storyteller indicates the point of the story, and ‘coda’, i.e., the final segment in which the storyteller creates a link between the world of the narrative and the present moment of the conversation.

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gestures 3 ——————————————————————————————————— EM: IM1: ask me ok the first time ‘‘what’s up’’ I don’t know whats that mean IM2: JM: SF1: SF2: ============================================= EM looks up in air 4 ——————————————————————————————————— EM: you didn’t know ‘‘what’s up’’ IM1: you know yeah I didn’t know IM2: JM: SF1: SF2: ============================================= JM looking up looking up 5 ——————————————————————————————————— EM: heh heh heh heh heh mmm IM1: [ ] it’s very funny now I IM2: heh heh heh heh heh JM: what’s up what’s up SF1: SF2: ============================================= JM looks down with exaggerated head gesture 6 ——————————————————————————————————— EM: IM1: I know lots of slangs so it’s better for me IM2: JM: what’s down SF1: SF2: ============================================= In this example, limited lexical and syntactic resources are supplemented by exploitation of discourse context, pragmatics, and especially non-verbal behaviour to establish and build on a theme of common experience. Here, the theme might be characterized as basic strategies of the beginning language learner for coping with incomprehensible native speakers in interaction. The native English speaker provides initial scaffolding, and then one learner initiates the joking frame. A second learner extends the frame, while the native English speaker plays within the frame as established. A third learner then makes a contribution which fits within both the initial and the extended frame. The

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example shows how the American, French, and Japanese collaborators are able to time their responses very precisely within the joking episode, without interrupting or even overlapping each other; they have apparently succeeded in establishing conversational involvement through situated cross-cultural interactional synchrony. In the next example, (3), the broader discourse context, as in the previous example, is a discussion of what it was like for the learners at the beginning of the semester when they first arrived in the United States. I have provided two versions of transcription of the interaction, the first designed to give a quicker sense of the overall pattern of joking (and to show the important intonation contours), the second including everything from the initial question through the end of the joking episode. The American student asks for examples of misunderstandings and funny things upon arrival in the USA: (3) Learner 1 (French):

Learner 2 (Japanese): American: Learner 2 (Japanese)

American: Learner 3 (Japanese): American: Learner 2 (Japanese): Learner 3 (Japanese): Learner 2 (Japanese): Learner 3 (Japanese):

& ! The first time me here I see people & do you ah How are you doing? ! & Me: yes. Yes or no. Yes I am here. & & I am French: yes. & & Where do you from: no. & % When in doubt, just say yes, right? ! & & Me no: OK. Yeah OK Always OK & & all right OK.

============================================ 1 —————————————————————————————————— EF: Did you have any problems ah communicating with people FM: yes JF: JM: ============================================

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2 —————————————————————————————————— EF: yeah like what give me an example something FM: some JF: communicate JM: yeah always yeah ============================================ 3 —————————————————————————————————— EF: funny that happened while you were you thought a word meant FM: thing heh heh heh [ ] JF: hah hah hah JM: ============================================ 4 —————————————————————————————————— EF: this n mmhmm FM: the first time me here I see people do you ah JF: JM: huh ============================================ 5 —————————————————————————————————— EF: FM: how are you doing me yes heh heh heh heh heh JF: ah hah hah hah hah JM: ============================================ JF uses 2 fingers to show binary option 6 —————————————————————————————————— EF: hah hah hah yes I am here heh heh heh heh FM: JF: yes or no hah hah –h –h ah I am French no heh heh JM: ============================================ 7 —————————————————————————————————— EF: heh heh heh when in doubt just say yes right FM: JF: heh heh heh where do you from yes heh heh heh JM: ============================================ 8 —————————————————————————————————— EF: eh heh heh heh yeah FM: [ ] JF: ah h- OK OK hehheheh JM: me no OK always all right OK heh hah ============================================

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The native English speaker provides the initial piece of scaffolding with her question in line 1, ‘‘Did you have any problems ah communicating with people?’’. Three of the learners respond immediately (at the end of line 1 through the beginning of line 2), two with affirmative markers ‘‘yes, yeah’’, apparently indicating that they had recognized a yes/no question. The third repeats a form of the main verb in the question, ‘‘communicate,’’ and one of the others supplies a new, and appropriate, adverb, ‘‘always’’. The native English speaker probes further (lines 2–4), repeating the more informal form of the affirmative marker, ‘‘yeah’’, and then provides an informal probe, ‘‘like what?’’ followed up with a self-paraphrase, ‘‘give me an example’’. She elaborates further, giving yet more specific information about what she is looking for, ‘‘something funny that happened while you were...’’ She breaks off the subordinate clause, which would have required a progressive form in the past, substituting a much simpler construction: ‘‘you thought a word meant this...’’ in which she pares down to a possible core source of a misunderstanding. In this grammatical simplification, offering a basic syntactic scaffolding, she uses simple past tense, and a coordinate structure (she was apparently going to continue with ‘‘and (or but) it really meant that’’, with contrastive stress on ‘‘that’’). In fact, however, the learners did not use her syntactic scaffolding as offered in this case, but came up with their own forms. The French speaking learner (FM) repeats her word, ‘‘something’’ (lines 2–3), and then initiates his anecdote, my reading of which is as follows: ‘‘When I first arrived in the United States, whenever I would see people who greeted me with ‘How are you doing?’, the only thing I knew how to say was ‘yes’’’. He achieves this with extremely limited means, partly because his contribution is interpreted within the previous discourse context, which includes not only the expectation that he will share something having to do with miscommunication, but also that it will be funny or amusing. He uses prosody to create three segments in his anecdote, corresponding roughly to the three clauses of my ‘reading’ above: he has falling contours on ‘‘here’’ (line 4), ‘‘doing,’’ and ‘‘yes’’ (line 5), signaling the ends of his three units. In FM’s first unit, ‘‘the first time me here’’ (line 4), he uses a formulaic expression, ‘‘the first time’’, which also happens to be a direct translation from French (‘‘la premie`re fois’’), to approximate ‘‘when I first arrived here’’. He produces a verbless clause, which he has anchored in the past, given the established discourse context, with a temporal phrase. This construction, including his inappropriate choice of the objective form of the first person singular pronoun, ‘‘me’’, elicits ‘‘huh?’’ as a reaction by a Japanese learner (JM) in line 4. (Since FM uses the appropriate form, ‘‘I’’, in the second segment, it is clear that he knows the form; but since he uses the objective form again in the third segment, a possibility is that he is simply, at this early stage of his language learning, more frequently accessing the form that is most like French ‘‘moi’’.) FM’s falling contour on ‘‘here’’ appears to signal completion of a unit; he has set the stage for the interaction that he will next describe. In the second unit, he produces a transitive clause in the simple present; we are able to interpret ‘‘I see people’’ as ‘‘whenever I saw people’’ because of the previous discourse

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context consisting of his own temporal deixis, ‘‘the first time’’, with the discourse background of the native English speaker’s question about the past. The juxtaposition of ‘‘I see people’’ and his representation of a greeting, ‘‘do you ah how are you doing’’, with the pause in between (at ‘‘ah’’)—during which the NES provides an encouraging backchannel (mmhmm)—allow us to recognize that either the FM or ‘‘people’’ are the speakers of the greeting. The construction with ‘‘I’’ as simultaneously ‘agent’ (doer of the action) and grammatical subject leads us to expect that ‘‘I’’ is the speaker (compare: ‘‘People see me...do you ah how are you doing?’’, in which ‘‘people’’ in the agent/subject position leads us to expect that ‘‘people’’ refer to the speakers of the greeting). Thus, for the listener, it is not quite clear, at first, which of the two he intends (given the reasonable assumption that, as a beginning English learner, he could have known how to produce greetings), until he produces unit three, in which ‘‘me’’ is clearly the utterer of ‘‘yes’’. At this point, the listener is able to retroactively interpret the second unit through parallelism with the third. Within the second and third of his units, he has a similar prosodic pattern: the first part of the unit ends with a flat contour followed by a pause (‘‘I see people (pause)’’; and ‘‘me (pause)’’, respectively). It is primarily the prosodic parallelism which allows appropriate identification of the speaker of the greeting (that it’s ‘‘people’’ rather than the FM who said ‘‘how are you doing?’’). If laughter can be taken as an indicator here of the moment of ‘getting’ the joke, it is interesting that it is one of the other learners (JF) who laughs before the native English speaker does, along with FM (at the end of line 5). She (JF) displays her understanding not only by laughing but also non-verbally by raising two fingers to show the binary option as she says (line 6) ‘‘yes or no’’. She has grasped the humor, and is displaying her understanding by elaborating appropriately within the joking frame; it is reasonable that an absolute beginner with English would know not only ‘‘yes’’ but also ‘‘no’’. In the meantime, the native English speaker is laughing to signal understanding, and then displaying understanding by playing strictly within the frame established, expanding FM’s ‘‘yes’’ response with ‘‘Yes, I am here’’ (line 6). She thereby represents, by taking FM’s role and speaking for him, the minimal comprehension and desperation of the rank beginner language learners, when confronted with actual native speakers trying to interact with them. Meanwhile, JF is elaborating on the expansion of the frame which she has set out: the options are both yes and no. She then generates two more units which contain two prosodically parallel parts. Her units each have two falling contours with a slight pause between. They are interpretable as representing two speakers, the first being a native speaker questioner, and the second being the beginning learner with the vocabulary of only ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’. Her second unit is clearly a native speaker questioner and the beginner learner responder: ‘‘where do you from/ yes’’, on the model of ‘‘how are you doing...yes’’ above. Her first unit is trickier and I suggest represents a performance error which is appropriately interpreted through discourse context. JF appears to be modeling a mechanical alternation of ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’ in answer to the incomprehensible questions of the native speakers,

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and to be trying to create maximum absurdity in the process. I suggest that she intended to generate a question in the first unit, in effect ‘‘Are you French?’’ to which the absurd answer (for the Frenchman) would be ‘‘no’’. Notice that she has actually performed a ‘social deixis; shift here (cf. Brown and Levinson, 1987), taking on the role of the initiator of the joking frame. The cognitive intimacy is manifested not so much in ‘reading the FM’s mind’ as in creating a train of thought for FM and speaking for him. And we are able to understand her communicative intent because of the discourse context. JF’s extension of the joking frame can be summarized as follows: she expands the possible answers from only ‘‘yes’’ to both ‘‘yes’’ and ‘‘no’’; taking the FM’s pattern and condensing it to pairs representing the native speaker and the beginning learner, she has actually taken the role of the joking frame initiator. In the meantime, the native English speaker is following through on JF’s elaboration of the joking frame, now offering an explicit ‘lexicalization of intent’: ‘‘when in doubt, just say yes, right?’’, which models appropriate usage of a stock phrase which is often used by native English speakers in spontaneous joking contexts. Her comment also fits nicely with JF’s immediately preceding ‘‘yes’’-pair. The final elaboration within the joking frame is provided by the other Japanese learner (JM), who apparently responds to the native English speaker’s general statement about ‘‘yes’’ being the appropriate response (and thus also responds to the initial joking frame principles laid out by FM). He produces a highly telegraphic utterance (‘‘me no OK’’—line 8), which is prosodically parallel to FM’s ‘‘me.. yes’’ above, with a mid flat contour on ‘‘me no’’ and a falling contour on ‘‘OK’’. It is not, however, syntactically or pragmatically parallel. Whereas FM’s expansion would be ‘‘I (always) say yes’’, JM’s expansion would be ‘‘I don’t say yes (or ‘‘For me it’s not the case that I always say yes’’); I (always) say OK’’. What the ‘‘no’’ negates is the native English speaker’s proposition that the beginner in doubt should always say ‘‘yes’’. Then the ‘‘OK’’ with falling contour is expanded as ‘‘I always say OK’’. The native English speaker picks up on this first, and responds with an affirming ‘‘yeah’’ (line 8), and JF immediately afterwards repeats OK twice delightedly and chuckles (line 8). From her point of view, JM is elaborating also on her extension of the joking frame. And the JM continues while the JF is repeating OK to elaborate his contribution with ‘‘...always alright OK’’, providing his own synonym. In contrast to the previous example, (3), in which the native speaker initiated joking and a learner joined in, in this example the joking is initiated and built upon primarily by the learners, with the native speaker providing a supportive role. The achievement of finely-tuned coordinated joint action across cultures, a form of interactional synchrony, is documented here among these native speakers of American English, French, and Japanese. This example also illustrates the potential importance of the American participant’s role in providing standard joking ‘lines’ in spontaneous contexts (e.g., ‘‘when in doubt, just....’’), thus providing socialization into American friendships. The final example, (4) below, documents that a learner can build on the scaffolding of the discourse context, draw on pragmatic resources which compensate for problems in syntax and prosody, and craft an utterance which initiates a joking

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footing and simultaneously serves as a classic punch line, eliciting a simultaneous laughter response from all of the other group members. The general theme of the humor is the helplessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers. This episode takes place at the end of the semester, as the group is reminiscing and reflecting on their experience and on their progress in learning English. The initiator jokes on a statement by another learner; the native English speaker is not involved except as inadvertent collaborator in setting up the joke by getting clarification on the point AM1 is making, and in responding with laughter. The first Arabic speaker (AM1), who has had American roommates during the course of the semester, has just said that he had been told ‘‘by everyone’’ in his country that after just three months in the United States he would be speaking like a native. (4) ============================================ 1 —————————————————————————————————— EM: AM1: now my roommates didn’t understand me I feel bad [ ] AM2: [ ] TM: what SM: ============================================ 2 —————————————————————————————————— EM: well do they still do you sti- do they still have trouble understanding you AM1: AM2: TM: SM: ============================================ nods 3 —————————————————————————————————— EM: mmm AM1: some not as much as at the beginning but but there are [ AM2: TM: SM: ============================================ mock emphatic gesture laugh quality in voice 4 —————————————————————————————————— EM: heh heh heh AM1: ] heh heh heh heh heh AM2: your problem just your roommate go get another one TM: heh heh heh heh heh SM: heh heh he heh heh ============================================

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AM1 frames his utterance with the temporal ‘‘now’’, but then mixes tenses confusingly in his juxtaposed clauses: ‘‘my roommates didn’t understand me... I feel bad’’ (line 1). The confusion is reflected both in the response of a learner, ‘‘what?’’ (line 1), and in the response of the native English speaker who seeks clarification (line 2 ). The native English speaker apparently bases his past time interpretation on the auxiliary past tense cue in the first clause (‘‘my roommates didn’t understand me’’), and follows up with a present tense with present perfect overtones, ‘‘well do they still do you sti- do they still have trouble understanding you?’’ AM1’s response establishes that whereas there has been some improvement, there is still what he perceives to be a problem. Just as he is about to elaborate, AM2 interrupts with his joking utterance, ‘‘your problem just your roommate; go get another one’’. The utterance is paralleled by a mock emphatic gesture. The joking is very successful, as indicated by the laughter response from everyone in the group, which begins for all, either overlapping with his final word, ‘‘one’’, or immediately afterward. It seems not to matter for the joke that AM2 uses non-native contrastive stress (putting the nuclear stress on ‘‘one’’ with a low pitch level), since everyone begins laughing right after he utters the word ‘‘another’’ without the native speaker’s nuclear stress on the second syllable and high pitch level, only then falling to ‘‘one’’. The effectiveness of the joking utterance can be explained using concepts from linguistic pragmatics. What has been being discussed is AM1’s ‘problem’ of communication with his roommate, although that particular word has not been used by him or by the others. Within the normal discourse world, the learner’s lack of expertise in English is assumed to be the source of the difficulty, the reason why his roommate cannot always understand what he is trying to communicate. Within AM2’s utterance, in terms of ‘topic’/‘comment’ structure (link to what is being discussed in previous discourse/additional information to be added), AM2 starts out very effectively with the noun phrase ‘‘your problem’’ which effectively lexicalizes the discourse topic. Within the normal discourse world of an English Language Institute, especially since ‘‘problem’’ has been modified with ‘‘your’’, the listener then expects to hear something in the comment about ways in which AM1’s deficiencies can be corrected by more assiduous study of English or more intensive speaking practice, etc. The minimizer ‘‘just’’ leads the listener to expect that the speaker is trying to show how the problem can be easily corrected. But the comment surprises the listener by violating discourse expectations and suddenly identifying the source of difficulty as the roommate. The humor frame which AM2 has now established equates the learner’s intelligibility problem with the roommate and also suggests that the problem is easily solved; a natural extension of the frame is to suggest that the roommate be replaced. This is classic language learner’s humor in which the heavy weight of responsibility for learning to use a new language effectively is momentarily lifted—as in fantasy, it is dumped on the native speakers of the language being learned. In the elaboration of the comment, ‘‘go get another one’’, AM2 extends the language learner’s humor by representing the learner as an active agent who can choose native speakers on the basis of their ability to understand him, rather than a relatively helpless learner with a distinct disadvantage in terms of linguistic resources. Of course a

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further layer of meaning for the learners is that they are aware that native speakers differ in their ability to understand and interact effectively with non-native speakers.

5. Conclusion Taking a perspective on language learning as socialization, this paper has documented the ability of language learners, under certain circumstances, to collaborate in the construction of conversational joking discourse with native English speakers, using scaffolding involving various dimensions of the discourse context. Analyses have been offered showing the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, with examples represented of primary reliance on nonverbal and lexical resources, on prosodic resources, and on pragmatic resources. The examples illustrate—through a close linguistic analysis, based in Gumperz’s theory of conversational inference (1982a), which highlights the interdependence of linguistic levels—that scaffolding needs to be understood in the broadest possible sense.20 Successful participation in the construction of joking episodes has been shown to be a question of grasping, and then playing within, the principles of the joking frame. The key dimension of communicative competence required of participants in conversation joking might be characterized as a sensitivity to interaction which allows quick perception of a mutual focus of attention and shared context, in effect a shared culture in microcosm which can then be used for extension of the joking frame. Conversational joking has been characterized as a specialized joint activity, with a dimension akin to verbal art (Tannen, 1989), in which the joking proceeds according to a matching of selected characteristics: a repetition, as we have seen in the analyses, of lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic dimensions of the discourse, as well as a rhythmic matching which allows well-coordinated joint interaction. The claim has been made that communication is achieved indirectly within these jointly-constructed joking episodes or ‘footings’ through displaying understanding by playing within or extending the frame set out by the other. This is the main reason why it is so important in terms of the development of rapport—it demonstrates the fine-tuning of understanding. These examples also illustrate the development of a shared culture of the language learner as revealed through the content of the humor. This focus on the achievement of communication in cross-cultural situations stands in contrast to and attempts to provide a counterbalance to research using a similar approach which analyzes cross-cultural miscommunication as a point of departure.21 The importance of the role of the native speaker and the nature of the interactional context is demonstrated in these analyses, highlighting the value in a language program of providing opportunities for structured informal interaction. Within the peer conversation groups, we have seen how conditions were created in which 20 This extension of the possibilities for scaffolding is consistent with the call by Ellis and Roberts (1987) for research which integrates issues related to the social context, interactional skills and knowledge, and the development of all aspects of communicative competence, including the linguistic code. 21 See, for example, Gumperz (1982b), Tannen (1986), Davies (1987a), and Tyler and Davies (1990). Davies and Tyler (1994) present a teaching/research methodology which takes a more balanced perspective.

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collaborative discourse could be constructed, with the native speaker providing important support ranging from initiating joking, to collaboration in joking initiated by learners, to simply negotiating the discourse context which allowed learners to initiate joking. We have also seen an example of how the native speaker provided a stock joking line in context. In this situation, the learners are given an opportunity not only to learn how to engage in the joking activity, but also to experience its social meaning in American society. This experience, if appropriately facilitated, will also allow them to examine and come to terms with their own cultural attitudes about the situational appropriateness of joking interaction as a speech activity. Thus they are developing the cross-cultural communicative competence which will allow them to participate in social networks when they enter American universities, forming important friendships with Americans. Finally, in the content of the joking we have had a glimpse into a ‘culture of the language learner’. We have seen variations on the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience. The examples have highlighted the challenge for the language learner posed by the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions in language, the difficulty of coping with interaction in the new language (for many learners the shock of the transition from classroom English in textbooks to informal English in conversation with monolingual native speakers), and the general powerlessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers. We have also seen the complexity of humorous communication, for instance in the third example analyzed, in which the responsibility for learning to use a new language effectively is momentarily transferred to the native speakers of the language being learned. At the same time, the learner is portrayed as someone who can actively choose native speakers on the basis of their ability to understand him, rather than as a relatively helpless learner. A further layer of meaning is that the language learners are aware that native speakers differ in their ability to understand and interact effectively with non-native speakers. The goals of the ‘reminiscing’ task which elicited the conversational joking were achieved through the cognitive and affective characteristics of humor: cognitively, the learners were able to achieve a second perspective on their experience, thereby gaining flexibility; effectively, the learners were able to simultaneously distance themselves and offer mutual comfort in a challenging situation. References Alexander, Richard J., 1997. Aspects of verbal humor in English. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tu¨bingen. Alford, Kathleen F., 1981. The structure of joking relationships in American society. In: Cheska, A.T. (Ed.), Play as Context. Leisure Press, West Point, NY, pp. 268–278. Apte, Mahadev, 1985. Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Attardo, Salvatore, 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Athanasiadou, Angeliki, 1991. The discourse function of questions. Pragmatics 1, 107–122. Barbe, Katharina, 1995. Irony in Context. Benjamins, Amsterdam. Bateson, Gregory, 1972. A theory of play and fantasy. In: Bateson, G. (Ed.), Steps to An Ecology of Mind. Ballantine, New York, pp. 177–193.

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Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bruner, Jerome S., 1981. The social context of language acquisition. Language and Communication 1, 155–178. Canale, Michael, 1983. From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. In: Richards, J., Schmidt, R. (Eds.), Language and Communication. Longman, London, pp. 2–28. Canale, Michael, Swain, Merrill, 1980. Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1, 1–47. Candlin, Christopher N., 1981. Discoursal patterning and the equalizing of interpretive opportunity. In: Smith, L. (Ed.), English for Cross-cultural Communication. Macmillan, London, pp. 166–198. Celce-Murcia, Marianne, 1995. The elaboration of sociolinguistic competence: implications for teacher education. In: Alatis, J., Straehle, C., Gallenberger, B., Ronkin, M. (Eds.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 699–710. Chafe, Wallace L., 1982. Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In: Tannen, D. (Ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Ablex, Norwood, NJ, pp. 35–53. Chafe, Wallace L., 1984. Cognitive Constraints on Information Flow. (Berkeley Cognitive Science Report No. 26). UCB Cognitive Science Program, Berkeley, CA. Clark, Herbert H., 1996. Using Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Clift, Rebecca, 1999. Irony in conversation. Language in Society 28, 523–553. Coser, Rose Laub, 1959. Some social functions of laughter: a study of humor in a hospital setting. Human Relations 12, 171–182. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1984. Joint joking: improvisational humorous episodes in conversation. In: Brugman, C., Macaulay, M., Dahlstrom, Emanatian, M., Moonwomon, B., O’Connor (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. University of California, Berkeley, CA, pp. 360–371. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1986. You Had to be There: The Pragmatics of Improvisational Joking in Relation to a Sociolinguistic Theory of Conversation. Unpublished PhD dissertation, U.C. Berkeley. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1987a. Cross-cultural ‘joking.’ Paper presented at First Conference of the International Pragmatics Association, Antwerp, Belgium. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1987b. A pragmalinguistic analysis of non-serious communication. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America, San Francisco, CA. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1988. Illuminating cross-cultural interaction: feedback on pragmatic and discourse competence as awareness training in a peer conversation group program. Paper presented at Southeastern Regional TESOL Conference, Orlando, FL. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1989a. Potential sources of cross-cultural pragmatic failure in German and American conversational style. Paper presented at Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages and Literatures, Winterhaven, FL. Davies, Catherine Evans, 1989b. The role of sense of humor in the interactional construction of crosscultural rapport. Paper presented at Southeastern Regional TESOL Conference, Raleigh, NC. Davies, Catherine Evans, Tyler, Andrea, 1994. Demystifying cross-cultural (mis)communication: improving performance through balanced feedback in a situated context. In: Madden, C., Myers, C. (Eds.), Discourse and Performance of International Teaching Assistants. TESOL Publications, Washington, DC, pp. 201–220. Ellis, Rod, Roberts, Celia, 1987. Two approaches for investigating second language acquisition. In: Ellis, R. (Ed.), Second Language Acquisition in Context. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, pp. 3–30. Erickson, Frederick, Shultz, Jeffrey, 1982. The Counselor as Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews. Academic Press, New York. Falk, Jane, 1979. The Conversational Duet. PhD dissertation, Princeton University. Farrer, Claire, 1981. Contesting. In: Cheska, A.T. (Ed.), Play as Context. Leisure Press, West Point, NY, pp. 195–208. Freud, Sigmund, 1905/1960. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Trans. J. Strachey). Norton, New York. Freud, Sigmund, 1928. Humor. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9, 1–6.

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Tannen, Deborah (Ed.), 1986. Discourse in cross-cultural communication (special issue). Text 6(2). Tannen, Deborah, 1993. What’s in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations. In: Tannen, D. (Ed.), Framing in Discourse. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 14–56. Tyler, Andrea, Davies, CatherineEvans, 1990. Cross-linguistic communication missteps. Text 10, 385–411. Vega, Gabriela, 1990. Humor competence: the fifth component. Paper presented at the National TESOL Conference, New York City. Catherine Evans Davies is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the English Department at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where she currently directs the M.A.-TESOL Program and the new PhD concentration in Applied Linguistics (Discourse, Culture, and English Language Studies). She received an MA in foreign language education from Stanford University in 1968, and a PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Her research centers around conversational interaction, particularly in cross-(sub)cultural contexts, and the linguistic presentation of self. Currently, she is working on a project concerning the sociolinguistic repertoires of American Southerners.