At first sight it might seem that corpus linguistics and humour studies make odd bedfellows. Corpus linguistics seeks regularities across large bodies of text, humour often lies in the peculiarity of a single instance. The former has a reputation for concerning itself with decontextualized chunks of language whilst humour often resides in the subtle exploitation of interactional cues in the context of situation. Corpus linguistics is able to search for lexical items through very large bodies of language data but, with certain exceptions, such as canned jokes, there is no special vocabulary of humor to locate. And, indeed, until recently there has been little collaboration between the two fields. However, recent years have seen the development of a certain type of corpus linguistics, known as corpus-assisted discourse studies (or CADS; Partington, Duguid and Taylor 2013) which specialises in combining quantitative corpus techniques and more traditional close analysis (and methods in between) in discourse studies and conversation analysis, disciplines of which verbal humour studies is a constituent. One important distinction is between studies in which the corpus is used as a simple repository of a large number of potential examples of humour behaviour to be subjected to traditional close reading and those which combine close reading with the employment of a wider range of corpus linguistics techniques. In this chapter we will concentrate on the latter type.
Corpus-assisted studies of humour and laughter-talk
PARTINGTON, ALAN SCOTT
2017
Abstract
At first sight it might seem that corpus linguistics and humour studies make odd bedfellows. Corpus linguistics seeks regularities across large bodies of text, humour often lies in the peculiarity of a single instance. The former has a reputation for concerning itself with decontextualized chunks of language whilst humour often resides in the subtle exploitation of interactional cues in the context of situation. Corpus linguistics is able to search for lexical items through very large bodies of language data but, with certain exceptions, such as canned jokes, there is no special vocabulary of humor to locate. And, indeed, until recently there has been little collaboration between the two fields. However, recent years have seen the development of a certain type of corpus linguistics, known as corpus-assisted discourse studies (or CADS; Partington, Duguid and Taylor 2013) which specialises in combining quantitative corpus techniques and more traditional close analysis (and methods in between) in discourse studies and conversation analysis, disciplines of which verbal humour studies is a constituent. One important distinction is between studies in which the corpus is used as a simple repository of a large number of potential examples of humour behaviour to be subjected to traditional close reading and those which combine close reading with the employment of a wider range of corpus linguistics techniques. In this chapter we will concentrate on the latter type.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
