The specificity of interactive humor on messaging applications. The case of WhatsApp conversations

The specificity of interactive humor on messaging applications. The case of WhatsApp conversations

Francisco Yus
Universidad de Alicante

francisco.yus@ua.es

This paper addresses various aspects of humor in digital conversational interaction through messaging apps, specifically on WhatsApp, and focusing on the analysis of typed conversations, often complemented by other visual or multimodal discourses (emojis , memes, GIFs, stickers…). The analysis begins with a tour of the qualities of the interface that, one way or another, condition this type of interaction, the so-called contextual constraints (Yus 2016a, 2016b, 2017). This analysis will allow us to determine the similarities and/or differences between humorous face-to-face interaction and the one established through these apps, thus highlighting the specificity of this interactive digital genre. A second part of the analysis focuses on determining, with the help of a corpus of WhatsApp conversations (complete chats collected and downloaded) and “screenshots” provided by different users, different intentions and humorous situations, together with recurrent conversational patterns in the interaction depending on the qualities of the different turns making up the messaging conversation.

References

Yus, F. (2016a) Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Yus, F. (2016b) “Towards a cyberpragmatics of mobile instant messaging.” In: Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2016: Global Implications for Culture and Society in the Networked Age. Ed. Jesús Romero-Trillo. Berlin: Springer, 7-26.

Yus, F. (2017) “Contextual constraints and non-propositional effects in WhatsApp communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 114: 66-86.