What’s Your Laughter Doing There? A Taxonomy of the Pragmatic Functions of Laughter

Abstract

L AUGHTER is a crucial signal for communication and managing interactions. Until now no consensual approach has emerged for classifying laughter. We propose a new framework for laughter analysis and classification, based on the pivotal assumption that laughter has propositional content. We propose an annotation scheme to classify the pragmatic functions of laughter taking into account the form, the laughable, the social, situational, and linguistic context. We apply the framework and taxonomy proposed in a multilingual corpus study (French, Mandarin Chinese and English), involving a variety of situational contexts. Our results give rise to novel generalizations about the range of meanings laughter exhibits, the placement of the laughable, and how placement and arousal relate to the functions of laughter. We have tested and refuted the validity of the commonly accepted assumption that laughter directly follows its laughable. In the concluding section, we discuss the implications our work has for spoken dialogue systems. We stress that laughter integration in spoken dialogue systems is not only crucial for emotional and affective computing aspects, but also for aspects related to natural language understanding and pragmatic reasoning. We formulate the emergent computational challenges for incorporating laughter in spoken dialogue systems.

Laughter as language

“…17 These examples use funny as a means of "lexifying" incongruity. And in line with the finding that humour appreciation is the commonest use of laughter in conversation (Mazzocconi et al 2020), this seems to be the most frequent word used therefor. But other words such as weird or unusual are possible, as exemplified in (i,ii): enables such laughter to serve as a scare-quoting device (Predelli 2003): in (16a(i)) the term long term friend is presented as a euphemism, whereas in (16a(ii)) it is the term friend which is at issue; (16b) exemplifies an analogous effect where in (i) the issue is what is to be pressed, whereas in (ii) it is what entity the red object is; similar remarks apply to (16c), which involves a sigh rather than a laugh: 18…”

“…With respect to placement, one very influential view due to Provine (1993) has been that laughter always follows the laughable and only occurs between spoken utterances; Vettin & Todt (2004) offer a more nuanced account, but assume adjacency between laughter and laughable and exclude laughs that occur in the middle of or overlap with an utterance. Mazzocconi et al (2020) demonstrate (for French and Chinese in the DUEL corpus and English in the BNC) that only 72% of laughs immediately follow their referents. Instead, the laugh can occur before, during or after the laughable with wide time ranges.…”

“…This novel view of laughter enables us to derive from first principles previous insights concerning laughter, including those from Conversation Analysis and those emanating from linguists working on humour, who have studied the notion of incongruity that seems key in explicating important aspects of the meaning of laughter. Moreover, we will show that our account can explain a wide, arguably unbounded range of uses laughter seems to exhibit (Mazzocconi et al 2020) by positing a small number of meanings and deriving the uses by dialogical and domain-based reasoning.…”

“…i. Mazzocconi et al (2020), discussed above, compared French, German, and Chinese interlocutors engaged in similar tasks and found all uses of laughter to be describable using the taxonomy developed in that paper, based on the basic meanings of (incongruity, pleasantness.…”

“…In fact, our view of laughter meaning means that we do not assume the existence of a limited set of discrete functions that are associated with laughter; in principle, distinct laughter episodes can give rise to an unbounded number of distinct inferences, as assumed, in both constructionist and appraisal views of emotional episodes. We have not addressed attested functions here, but Mazzocconi et al (2020) have developed a taxonomy for the functions of laughter building on the two basic meanings here. They utilize a taxonomy with four subtypes: pleasant incongruity (cases in which a clash between the laughable and certain background information is perceived as witty, rewarding and/or somehow pleasant), social incongruity (situations involving a clash between social norms and/or comfort and the laughable), pragmatic incongruity (cases when there is a clash between what is said and what is intended), and pleasantness (cases lacking incongruity where a sense of pleasantness/affiliation is either felt or displayed towards the interlocutor.).…”