3 research outputs found
Listenership in Japanese interaction: the contributions of laughter
This thesis contributes to the body of research on listenership. It accomplishes this
through an investigation of the functions of laughter in the listening behaviour of
participants in Japanese interaction.
The majority of studies concerning conversational interactions have focused on the role
of the speaker rather than on that of the listener. Notable work on the listener's active
role in conversation includes research done by Goffman (1981), Goodwin (1986) and
Gardner (2001). Laughter research has shifted from an early interest in the causes of
laughter to an interest in how it is organised and how it functions in conversational
interaction. Despite many studies on listenership and laughter as distinct areas of
research, there have been relatively few studies on how laughter contributes to
listenership behaviour.
In order to explore the relationship between listenership and laughter, I used a corpus of
spoken interactional data. This data consists of conversations between Japanese
participants (university students and teachers) who were asked to tell each other stories
about a surprising moment that they had experienced. The corpus was constructed in
such a way as to make it possible to compare (1) solidary (student-student) and
non-solidary (student-teacher) interactions and (2) higher status story-teller (teacher
telling student) and lower status story-teller (student telling teacher) interactions.
Qualitative methods (drawing on a variety of techniques of discourse analysis) were
used to discover laughter patterns and functions in relation to the role of the listener
both at the micro-level and in relation to the macro-structure of the surprise story-telling.
Quantitative methods were used to analyse the relationship between laughter
patterns/functions and the above interaction types (solidary/non-solidary and lower
status/higher status interactions).
I found, firstly, at the micro-level of analysis, that the listener’s laughter contributed to
the co-production of conversation through functions that included: responding/reacting,
constituting and maintaining. There were two patterns of the listener’s laughter that
were motivated by the speaker’s laughter invitation: acceptance, and declination.
Acceptance involved the functions of responding/reacting or constituting, with the
listener’s laughter functioning to support mutual understanding and bonding between
the participants. Declination could be related to signal the listener’s lack of support for
the speaker, however, the listener used the third option, the ambivalence. This shows
that despite the absence of laughter, a verbal acknowledgement or understanding
response was alternatively used. In a problematic situation, the listener’s laughter was
found to reveal the listener’s third contribution: the maintaining function, helping to
resolve an ongoing interactional problem. At the macro-level of analysis, based on the three phases in a surprise story, I found that
laughter played a key role at phase boundaries (1st: preface/telling; 2nd:
telling/response; and 3rd: response/next topic). The laughter patterns and functions
appeared in each boundary. The acceptance pattern was more frequent than other
patterns in all of the boundaries. The responding/reacting and constituting functions
mainly appeared in the acceptance. The patterns of laughter in a trouble context were
rare because they only appeared in a trouble context. The maintaining function in such a
context also occasionally occurred in order to repair the trouble situation.
Looking at laughter in relation to the different interaction types, I found, lastly, that the
solidary dyads tended to demonstrate acceptance (constituting the responding/reacting
and constituting functions), while the non-solidary dyads had a greater tendency to
show declination. In addition, the lower-ranked listeners tended to show ambivalence,
while the higher-ranked listeners tended to be more flexible in showing either
acceptance or declination. These findings suggest the existence of a relationship
between laughter patterns/functions and politeness: a higher degree of solidarity and a
lower degree of status can influence the display of acceptance patterns/functions and
listenership behaviour; a lower degree of solidarity and a higher degree of status can
indicate flexibility when choosing a response type. In a trouble situation, laughter in its
various patterns/functions was used in all interaction types to recover resolutions to any
impediments in the ongoing engagement.
All in all, I found that laughter contributes to listenership, both through supporting
affiliation and through helping to resolve ‘trouble’ situations. I showed how listenership
expressed through laughter plays a role in negotiating, creating, and maintaining the
relationship between the self and the other in mutual interactions. As implications, I
finally indicated that such laughter activities as the display of listenership could be
closely connected to the Japanese communication style