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Cliff Goddard* and Kerry Mullan Explicating verbs for “laughing with other peop

Cliff Goddard* and Kerry Mullan Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” in French and English (and why it matters for humour studies) https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2017-0114 Abstract: This study undertakes a contrastive lexical-semantic analysis of a set of related verbs in English and French (English to joke and to kid, French rigoler and plaisanter), using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach to semantic analysis. We show that the semantic and conceptual differences between French and English are greater than commonly assumed. These differences, we argue, have significant implications for humor studies: first, they shed light on different cultural orientations towards “laughter talk” in Anglo and French linguacultures; second; they highlight the danger of conceptual Anglocentrism in relying on English-specific words as a theoretical vocabulary for humor studies. Keywords: French, humor, joking, laughter talk, lexical semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) 1 Introduction First of all, it is important to explain our choice of title; in particular, the phrase “verbs for ‘laughing with other people.’” Why not use a shorter and more familiar expression, such as “humor-related verbs” or “verbs for joking”? The reason is simply that neither of these expressions would be cross-translatable into French. Although it is generally accepted that humor is a universal human behavior (cf. Martin 2006), how individuals understand and use humor differs, as illustrated by the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) developed by Martin et al. (2003). Of particular interest to us here is the fact that what people under- stand by the very term humor will be influenced, and indeed limited, by the *Corresponding author: Cliff Goddard, Griffith University School of Humanities Languages and Social Science, Nathan, Queensland, Australia, E-mail: c.goddard@griffith.edu.au Kerry Mullan, Global and Language Studies, RMIT University, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, E-mail: kerry.mullan@rmit.edu.au https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9078-0383 Humor 2019; aop Brought to you by | Columbia University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 10/22/19 4:53 PM language they speak. The English word humor lacks close and reliable equiv- alents in French (cf. Noonan 2011; Goddard 2017: § 3.3), and, as we show in this paper, the same applies to the English verb (to) joke. Conversely, English lacks close and reliable equivalents to French rigoler and plaisanter. To use English- specific words such as humor and joking as banner terms would be in effect to treat English as the “default language,” as Wierzbicka (2014a) puts it, and in the process introduce an element of terminological and conceptual Anglocentrism. This might strike some readers as a radical and/or unrealistic position. After all, humor studies is at present a predominantly Anglophone discipline (Tran- Gervat 2016) and as such, routinely relies on English-based terminology even when describing interactions conducted in other languages. What is the harm in this? some might say. Or if there is a cost, is it not the cost we must pay for the benefits of having English as the global lingua franca for social science? For the moment, we would like to defer these “big questions” until we have completed the main analytical project of our study, which is to undertake a contrastive lexical semantic analysis of a set of related verbs in English and French, using an essentially language-neutral methodology, namely, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth: NSM) approach (Wierzbicka 1996; Peeters 2006; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014; Ye 2017, and other works). It is not possible here to give a full account of the NSM theory but the key point is that it depicts the meanings of linguistic expressions using reductive cross-translatable para- phrases, i.e. paraphrases composed in a small, controlled vocabulary of cross- translatable words. The methodology has emerged from a decades-long program of cross-linguistic semantic research, inaugurated by Wierzbicka (1972). The bibliography of NSM publications is extensive: dozens of books and hundreds of refereed journal articles and book chapters. For a searchable database of publications, see [nsm-approach.net]. For a general introduction to the approach and supporting online resources, see the NSM Homepage [short URL bit.ly/ 1XUoRRV]. Using the NSM methodology, we hope to show that the semantic and conceptual differences between French and English are greater than com- monly assumed, but that there is a way in which the meaning content of these “local” categories and ways of speaking can be made explicit and accessible to cultural outsiders – not only from the languages concerned, but also from other languages. This should allow all parties to better understand and appreciate the perspectives of native speakers of the respective languages. The assumption here is that lexical categories, and ways of speaking generally, reflect routine ways of thinking and acting. To move forward with any comparative or contrastive semantic project, one first needs to find common ground, a set of “common terms” (tertium compara- tionis). Research in the NSM approach has established that there is a common 2 Cliff Goddard and Kerry Mullan Brought to you by | Columbia University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 10/22/19 4:53 PM ground of shared meanings across all or most languages, in the form of semantic primes such as ’someone’ and ‘people,’ ‘say’ and ‘do,’ ‘think’ and ‘know, ‘want’ and ‘feel,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘because,’ ‘if’ and ‘can,’ among others (Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014; Peeters 2006). These common terms can be used to craft semantic explications, i.e. explanatory paraphrases, for words in either lan- guage and the resulting explications will be cross-translatable. The full list of semantic primes is given in Appendix A, in parallel English and French versions. Comparable tables have been drawn up for about thirty languages from a diversity of language families, geographical locations and cultural types.1 As we explain shortly, NSM research also suggests that the word ‘laugh’ has close equivalents in all or most languages, even though it is clearly not a semantic prime (NSM researchers consider it to be a “semantic molecule,” see below). Some key points about NSM semantic explications are as follows. An explication is intended to be a real paraphrase – fashioned from simple, cross-translatable words – of what a word or other linguistic expression means to a speaker or to a hearer. This has the twin benefits of warding off any implicit definitional circularity and at the same time making the explications accessible to native speakers without specialist training. The primary criteria for a good explication are three-fold: that it is phrased entirely in NSM acceptable lexicon and syntax; that it is coherent, i.e. it makes sense as a whole, and that it is compatible with the range of uses of the expression being explicated and satisfies native speaker intuitions about interpreta- tion in context. Although these criteria allow one to evaluate proposed analyses, there are no fixed discovery procedures that lead directly from usage data to an optimal analysis. Essentially the NSM analyst faces the same challenge as a lexicographer, i.e. formulating a paraphrase that matches the range of use of a word, but with the constraint of doing so using a small controlled vocabulary of cross-translatable words. In the present study, we (the authors) chose the terms for analysis following a search of various dictionaries and corpora for the most prominent and com- mon verbs used when talking about humor in English and French. We then accessed naturally occurring examples of these words in several ways. For the English verbs joke and kid, we used a commercially available corpus service: WordBanks Online [http://wordbanks.harpercollins.co.uk]. This corpus also pro- vided information about frequency of use and about collocations. For French, we used google searches to compile our own corpus of examples of rigoler and plaisanter. For both languages, we also drew on our own intuitions as native or near-native speakers (Goddard – English, Mullan – English and French), and 1 These can be consulted at https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-human itieslanguages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/downloads. Explicating verbs for “laughing with other people” 3 Brought to you by | Columbia University Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 10/22/19 4:53 PM subsequently consulted informally with a number of colleagues with native or near-native language skills. Approximately one hundred examples of each term were examined, from which a number of representative examples appear below. 2 Most English and French “humor” terms do not match It seems important to note again that the English word humor is not straightfor- wardly translatable into French, and that the French word humor is not seman- tically equivalent (the most general comparable meta-category in French is perhaps rire [lit. laughter], as in the title of Henri Bergson’s famous treatise Le rire (1900)). We will not attempt, however, to take on this issue in the present study; see Goddard (2017) for an explication of the English humor. Here we set out instead to explicate the key verbs that are used in each language to depict pleasant “laughter-talk” with other people. The general lay of the land is summarized in Figure 1. It shows a surpris- ingly large degree of non-correspondence between the two languages. At a rough first pass, the key points are as follows: (i) The verb French rigoler can be rendered into English in several ways (laugh, have a good time, joke or kid), uploads/Litterature/ humor-2017-0114.pdf