Date

2017-07-21

Author

Baştürk Karatepe, Çağla
Işık Güler, Hale

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Impoliteness is usually defined as a cause of ‘social conflict and disharmony’ (Culpeper, 2005), and a violation of ‘socially sanctioned norm of interaction’ (Beebe, 1995). Then, how can a concept that can cause social disharmony cause humour, as well? Although impoliteness and humour are not two terms that sound related, this study focuses on impoliteness and humour triggers with a perspective of the most common multimodal elements, namely gesture (i.e. face, hand or body movements) and prosody (e.g. pitch and loudness) based on the TV comedy show: Arkadaşım Hoşgeldin (‘Welcome my Friend’). The show involves improvised skits performed by an actor, an actress, a pianist (who is a well-built man but called as ‘Minik’ – which means ‘tiny’ in English), a director (whose voice can only be heard), a guest actor/actress, and the audience in the hall. The first five episodes of the programme constitute the corpus of this study. The following research question is posed: How are humour and impoliteness triggered a) by multimodal elements (i.e. by gesture and prosody mostly in catchphrases); b) by humour support (Hay, 2001)? In line with the aims of this study, EXMARaLDA 1.5.2 and Praat, were used. Analysis of the data shows that gesture as a trigger of laughter mostly supports the Incongruity Theories of Humour as well as Superiority Theories of Humour. Behaviours and responses of interactants can be related to the concept of disaffiliative humour (Dynel, 2013) in which the butt is always humiliated by a superior interactant, but he is not offended at all. She notes that the impoliteness prevalent in such conversations is totally intentional. Therefore, humour resulting from such impoliteness is a matter of its genre (Uçar & Yıldız, 2015), i.e. entertaining impoliteness (Culpeper, 2005) or disaffiliative humour (Dynel, 2013). ‘Attitudinal function’ of prosody (Culpeper et al., 2003) is reflected as ‘greater amplitude and an increase in fundamental frequency (perceived as pitch)’ (Wichmann, 2010) in the data. However, it is hard to account for how prosody works for the meaning in Turkish due to the fact that “accent in Turkish is not so powerful as in English” (Lewis 2000, p. 36) and as a “pitch accent language”, there might be both words which are accentless and words which have lexically accented in Turkish (Güneş, 2013). Yet, context is an important cue to determine such attitudes. Humour is supported by the audience in the hall through laughter – which is the most common way (Attardo et al., 2011) of humour support (Hay, 2001). However, it is either criticised or silenced by the Director. In conclusion, the show provides good illustrations of how impoliteness and humour are enacted in TV discourse by using multimodal elements. It is unique in its improvised conversations and audience participation (the role as bystanders). The fact that both faces of the butt and the audience are attacked by the ‘Director’ necessitates the inclusion of the audience role into the genre: ‘entertaining impoliteness’ or ‘disaffiliative humour’ in media discourse.

URI

https://cdn.ymaws.com/pragmatics.international/resource/collection/C57D1855-A3BB-40D8-A977-4732784F7B21/15th%20IPC%20abstracts-Belfast.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/86823

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar