Jocular Mockery as Interactional Practice in Everyday Anglo-Australian Conversation

* I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments on an earlier version of this work.

Abstract

Teasing in everyday interactions, which combines elements of (ostensible) provocation and (ostensible) playfulness in a figurative cutting down or diminishment of a target, has been the subject of a growing body of studies. However, what has arguably not been as well studied to date is the interactional mechanics of the different kinds of social actions through which teasing is accomplished. In this paper, the way in which teasing as mocking/ridiculing can be accomplished within a jocular or non-serious frame, or what is here termed jocular mockery, is examined building on methodological and analytical insights from both interactional pragmatics and corpus-assisted pragmatics. It is argued based on this analysis that jocular mockery constitutes a recognizable and recurrent practice in everyday interactions amongst (Anglo-)Australian speakers of English. A framework for examining the dynamics of jocular mockery within everyday interactions is also proposed.

Keywords:

• Teasing
• Mocking
• Australian English
• Interactional Pragmatics
• Corpus-Assisted Pragmatics

Notes

* I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments on an earlier version of this work.

¹ Although see Béal and Mullan's (2013) framework for analysing conversational humour more broadly.

² Cf. earlier work by the author, which has emphasized the ways in which relationships between participants are co-constituted through jocular mockery (Haugh 2010a, 2011), or focused on how it may give rise to evaluations of (mock) impoliteness (Haugh 2011; Haugh & Bousfield 2012).

³ In a few cases, a chain of mocking remarks arguably constitutes a sequence in its own right, that is, where the main interactional business is simply the participants entertaining themselves rather than some attendant ‘serious’ interactional project.

⁴ The author would like to thank Rod Gardner for generously offering access to his collection of recordings and CA transcripts, and Pam Peters for kindly offering access to audio-recordings from the ICE-AUS and ART corpora (the latter being not yet freely available through the Australian National Corpus due to ethical and legal restrictions).

⁵ As briefly noted above, the 135 instances of jocular mockery were found in 93 interactional sequences, thus indicating that a large proportion of instances arose in such banter sequences. The analysis of jocular mockery vis-à-vis banter lies outside of the scope of this paper, however, due to constraints of space.

⁶ The role of non-verbal responses to jocular mockery thus remains an open question requiring further study.

⁷ Detailed analysis of responses of the target(s) as opposed to non-targets to other-directed jocular mockery lies outside of the scope of the current analysis, although preliminary analysis indicates a greater proportion of rejecting responses were initiated by the target (roughly 85%), a greater proportion of elaborative responses were initiated by other non-target participants (roughly 80%) and roughly similar proportions of responses going along with the mocking tease were found across target and non-target participants.

⁸ Australian English slang for having a fit of spasms, taken from the diminutive form of ‘spastic’, which is itself a pejorative vernacular term for a ‘retarded person’.