Metapragmatic Evaluation of Verbal Irony by Speakers of Russian and American English

The paper discusses metapragmatic assessment of verbal irony by speakers of Russian and American English. The research combines ideas from metapragmatics, folk linguistics and corpus linguistics. Empirical data are drawn from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Spontaneous evaluation of linguistic behavior is an important function of both explicit and implicit metapragmatic uses of language. Distributional adjectival patterns of the Russian word ирония and English irony are treated as implicit indicators of folk metapragmatic awareness. Connotations of the adjectives reflect our everyday linguistic practices and contribute to the vagueness of the notion and the definition of irony in scholarly theorizing

“Scientists Joke”: Evolution and Genres of Humour about Science and Scientists in Russia

The paper analyses humour about scientists and humour produced by scientists in Russia. The aim of the study is to track back the evolution of scholarly humour and analyse social factors that stand behind professional humour in the academia. The analysis centres around three categories of humour: “intellectual” humour, which requires knowledge in a specific branch of science, “professor vs. student” humour, which is based on our understanding of social relations between two social groups involved in academic communication. Finally, there is profession-specific humour based entirely on professional experience and is best understood by those involved in research. While “intellectual” and “professor vs. student” jokes are not unique to the Russian culture, profession-specific in-group humour reflects social problems characteristic of science in Russia. This category of scholarly humour has grown from the ongoing debates about criteria of academic excellence and the discussions about importance of science for society in general. Profession-specific humour mirrors social tension caused by the attempts to introduce quantitative measures of academic excellence and to reform science in Russia (the recent attempts at turning around the Russian Academy of Sciences being a good example of such a reform)

Semantic components of laughter behavior : a lexical field study of 14 translations of "One flew over the cuckoo’s nest"

This paper builds on a novel methodology of lexical semantics exemplified on lexical field theory by using several translations of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The present study, a large-scale collaboration, presents and compares the results for laugh, smile, grin, giggle, and other words for laughter behaviors across 14 languages and in extensive detail. The key results answer the question of what semantic dimensions the vocabularies of the various languages distinguish as marked by lexical contrasts and can inform future research in humor as well as translation studies. Based on our findings, a key marking emerges for audible (e.g., laugh) versus non-audible (e.g., smile) behaviors, as Indo-European vocabularies treat smiling as a less marked variant of laughing, e.g., German lächeln, Italian sorridere, Polish uśmiech, Turkish gülüm, but further orthogonal dimensions are documented as well, for example, aggressive, concealed, loud, or suppressed behavior. An updated hierarchy of these semantic features is proposed, and the results are presented in graphic visualizations, which also help illustrate idiosyncrasies of individual languages that go against the general trends. Exceptions to these general trends include lemmata that can cover both audible and inaudible behavior straddling what we claimed is the most important distinction (e.g., Danish grine). Finally, we outline a probabilistic method to compare word senses across languages based on aligned corpora large enough for computational approaches