The Interplay of Laughter and Communicative Purpose in Conversational Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study of British English

Laughter is used strategically in conversational discourse to accomplish pragmatic functions. While other researchers have investigated how contextual features such as cross-linguistic differences, group dynamics, and conversation topic influence the use of laughter, this study is among the first to examine the interplay of laughter and communicative purpose. Using the annotated Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Egbert et al. in Text & Talk 41:715–737, 2021), the frequency of laughter instances and laughter types (isolated, reciprocated, and coactive) were calculated across communicative purposes. The pragmatic functions of laughter in each communicative purpose were then analyzed qualitatively. Although laughter is most frequent within the communicative purpose of joking around, it occurs in over 35% of the discourse units in each of the communicative purposes, suggesting that laughter performs pragmatic functions beyond indicating humor. Each individual communicative purpose is also characterized by differential functions of laughter. This finding provides further evidence that the pragmatic functions of laughter and the communicative purposes of discourse shape each other in English conversation.