Mastering second language humour: the ultimate challenge

Résumé En

This study on interactional humour takes place within a larger project entitled “From perception to oral production”, the goal of which is to identify the links between comprehension and production processes and the sources of difficulty for French learners of English. The data consist of three comparable corpora of filmed semi-structured interviews between first (L1) and second (L2) language students: French-French L1; English-English L1; and English L1 with L2. The interviews revolve around the same extract of an American romantic comedy, watched in French for the French-French L1 interviews, and in English for the other interviews. The students were asked to give a description of a particular scene which centres on the offering of an unusual and unidentifiable gift, while explaining what they thought this gift might have been and why it was offered. While not originally designed to elicit humour from the participants, instances of spontaneous humour were identified in several interviews in all three corpora.Previous research into conversational humour of French and (Australian) English speakers has taken a cross-cultural comparative approach (Béal and Mullan 2013, 2017; Mullan and Béal in press). These studies revealed that the Australian participants showed a marked preference for mock aggressive recipient-oriented humour, incongruity and escalated absurd humour, whereas the French speakers preferred to reinforce complicity at the expense of an absent third party, and used linguistic play extensively. These findings will be compared with the humour identified in the three corpora here, adding a French-English intercultural approach to the existing cross-cultural research. This study will use Béal and Mullan’s (2013) model for the analysis of humour, which consists of the following four concurrent dimensions:1.The speaker/target/recipient interplay 2.The language dimension: linguistic mechanisms and/or discursive strategies used by speakers3.The different pragmatic functions4.The interactional dimensionThe humour used by native speakers of French and English will be used as a basis: findings from both previous research and from the three new corpora will be taken into consideration. We will then examine the humour used by the French students when speaking English to assess their ability to understand and produce humour in their second language, taking the above four dimensions into account. A number of representative examples from the corpora will be presented by way of illustration.