The humorous stylization of "new" women and men and conservative others

In this article I will discuss how a circle of middle-aged academics recreates its moral order of new gender standards by a consonant staging of the "others" and the "self" – "them" vs. "us". The progressive self as well as the conservative other with whom the self is confronted are exaggeratedly stylized in a similarly disjunctive way over the course of various stories. Hyper-stylization sharpens a juxtaposition of social types which is humorously overdrawn. The comical performance becomes a factor of amusement for the group

Aspekte der Höflichkeit im Vergleich der Kulturen

Haben Sie schon gegessen? Sicher finden Sie diese Anrede höchst merkwürdig; völlig deplaziert erscheint es Ihnen vermutlich, Sie nach dem Essen zu fragen. Mir ging es ähnlich, als mir diese Frage bei meinem ersten China-Aufenthalt 1982 bei zufälligen Begegnungen auf dem Campus der Universität, an der ich gearbeitet habe, gestellt wurde. Ich habe sie in Richtung Vorbereitung auf eine kommende Essenseinladung oder zumindest auf den Vorschlag, jetzt gemeinsam essen zu gehen, interpretiert und nach dem Prinzip der Ehrlichkeit beantwortet. Wenn ich gerade selbst hungrig war, habe ich "nein" gesagt. Dies führte nun aber keinesfalls zum erwarteten zweiten Schritt der von mir vermuteten Sequenz, nämlich dem Vorschlag "dann lassen Sie uns doch in ein Lokal gehen" – mein Gegenüber lachte etwas irritiert und entfernte sich von mir. Damals habe ich die Chinesen ein wenig seltsam gefunden und diese mich mit Sicherheit auch. Später erst habe ich erfahren, dass die Frage "nin che guo le ma?" eine ganz einfache Begrüßung darstellt, die etwa unserem "Guten Tag" entspricht. Man antwortet mit "ja, ich habe schon gegessen." Damit ist die Sequenz beendet und man geht seiner Wege. Begrüßungsrituale gehören ganz offensichtlich zum Feld der Höflichkeit, welches das Thema des vorliegenden Artikels ausmacht. Höflichkeit im Vergleich der Kulturen führt uns zu Unterschieden in ritualisierten Umgangsformen miteinander, zu Etikette, Benehmen, Rücksichtnahme, Imagearbeit im Gespräch

Gender-Sternchen, Binnen-I oder generisches Maskulinum, … (Akademische) Textstile der Personenreferenz als Registrierungen?

For more than 40 years, a debate on gender-related person references has been taking place in the German-speaking world. My contribution starts with a differentiation of four registers, which are currently practiced in writing and have developed specific reasoning discourses and specific social contexts of usage, as I try to show. I am going to examine these four styles of gendered person reference as “registers” in the sense of anthropological linguistics (Agha 2007). This concept of “enregisterment” implies that the producers connect themselves to a socio-symbolic cosmos and can be perceived with cultural evaluations (in production and re­ception), for example, as conservative, feminist, queer, liberal (Kotthoff 2017). Here I shall explore their (socio)linguistic underpinnings within conceptions of language ideology in order to grasp the communication-reflexive charges of these discourses

Lachkulturen heute : Humor in Gesprächen

Dieser Beitrag soll einen Einblick in die Forschung zur humoristischen Alltags-kommunikation geben, wie sie in der Sprach- und Gesprächsanalyse seit etwa zwanzig Jahren betrieben wird. Es geht im vorliegenden Beitrag nicht um Humor in den Medien, sondern um Humor beim Abendessen unter guten Freunden und Freundinnen, in der Kneipe, im Judoclub, beim Reiten, in der Schule, im Bauwagen oder im Orchester. Das wichtigste Instrument der Erhe-bung des alltäglichen Witzelns ist das Aufnahmegerät, das man in bestimm-ten Situationen, zu denen man sich über Mittelsleute Zugang verschafft, mit-laufen lässt. Natürlich sagt man den Leuten nicht, dass man gerade an ihrem Scherzen interessiert ist,1 weil dies die Daten verfälschen würde

Gender and humour.

The article presents a research overview on developments in the field of gender and humour over the last fifty years, going back a bit further in relation to literature and film. The research comes mainly from linguistics and communication studies, but also from sociology, psychology, literature and media studies. Most changes lie in the appropriation of multifaceted humorous forms by girls and women. Humour becomes apparent as a component of a social semiotics that indexes and stylizes (non)traditional gender poles. The sub-themes revolve around humour development in children, laughter as a form of communication, humour in the world of work and in the media

'Supra is not for women' : hospitality practices as a lens on gender and social change in Georgia

Peer reviewe

Oral genres of humor : On the dialectic of genre knowledge and creative authoring

The article discusses humorous conversational activities (e.g. jokes, teasing, joint fantasizing) in the context of genre theory. The high degree of creativity, emergent construction and artistry typical of humor call for a flexible concept of genre which makes sense of modifications and transgressions in communicative processes. Some forms of conversational humor are generic, for example, standardized jokes, joint fantasizing or teasing. Other forms exploit our knowledge of serious genres and activity types (thereby relying on it): e.g. humorous stories about problems, humorous gossiping or counseling. Here the keying is done from the start in such a way that a serious mode of understanding is undermined. Generic boundaries are often transgressed and disregarded in joking; new sub-types arise, such as absurd meta-jokes which violate the well-known expectation of a punch-line or other features of the genre. Nevertheless, the realizations of these genres are related only by a sort of family resemblance. The concept of intertextuality plays another important role in analyzing oral genres of humor. Genre knowledge is also employed when the speakers violate expected patterns in such a way that further information is located precisely in the violation. The article shows humorous co-construction as an emergent phenomenon, which nevertheless (or precisely for this reason) relies on genre knowledge

Oral genres of humor: on the dialectic of genre knowledge and creative authoring’. Pragmatics 17

Abstract The article discusses humorous conversational activities ((e.g. jokes, teasing, joint fantasizing) in the context of genre theory. The high degree of creativity, emergent construction and artistry typical of humor call for a flexible concept of genre which makes sense of modifications and transgressions in communicative processes. Some forms of conversational humor are generic, for example, standardized jokes, joint fantasizing or teasing. Other forms exploit our knowledge of serious genres and activity types (thereby relying on it): e.g. humorous stories about problems, humorous gossiping or counseling. Here the keying is done from the start in such a way that a serious mode of understanding is undermined. Generic boundaries are often transgressed and hybridized in joking; new sub-types arise, such as absurd metajokes which violate the well-known expectation of a punch-line or other features of the genre. Nevertheless, the realizations of these genres are related only by a sort of family resemblance. The concept of intertextuality plays another important role in analyzing oral genres of humor. Genre knowledge is also employed when the speakers violate expected patterns in such a way that further information is located precisely in the violation. The article shows humorous co-construction as an emergent phenomenon, which plays with genre knowledge