Presence and absence of laughter and gestures: examples from the Spoken BNC2014 and Dickens’ novels

Pace-Sigge, Michael 2024. Presence and absence of laughter and gestures: examples from the Spoken BNC2014 and Dickens’ novels. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 7 , pp. 233-257. 10.18573/jcads.116

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Abstract

This paper is concerned with extra-linguistic discourse markers in different types of conversation. Specifically, it investigates the presence and absence of two ways to underscore the meaning a speaker tries to convey, namely laughter and the use of gestures, a corpus-assisted approach will be used to look at these two types of discourses. First, the (transcribed) natural conversations found in the Spoken BNC2014 and second, the conversations by fictional characters as found in the novels of Charles Dickens will be compared for this purpose. This paper looks, in its first half, at instances where laughter is used in spoken conversations and investigates how the presence or absence of laughter reflects either a marked functional section within a given discourse or can be seen as a particular marker within the discourse. The second half of the article will look at the presence or absence of gestures that appear as a way to underpin what is said in the fictional discourses found in the novels of Charles Dickens.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2515-0251
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 June 2024
Date of Acceptance:	5 April 2024
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2024 09:51
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/169656

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