Hillary Clinton’s laughter in media interviews

Daniel C. O’Connell and Sabine Kowal
Abstract

Laughter in dialogue has been researched under the aegis of many different disciplines. The present approach is psycholinguistic, but with some reliance on recent research in phonetics and conversation analysis (CA). A corpus of laughter from four TV and two radio interviews of Hillary Clinton was analyzed by means of the PRAAT software (www.praat.org) for acoustic measurements. All the interviews had taken place in the several weeks immediately following the publication of her memoirs Living history (2003). The results showed that her laughter was concentrated mostly during the speech of the interviewers rather than during her own speech, and in the TV rather than in the radio interviews. The most frequent topic of her laughter concerned her own presidential candidacy rather than the historical contents of her book. The strong punctuation effect (Provine 1993, 2000), i.e., the claim that laughter occurs only during the pauses after phrases and sentences, was not confirmed; instead laughter occurred most frequently as a sort of back channeling on the part of the auditor. Contrary to the claim of Clayman and Heritage (2002) that media interviewers maintain a professional neutralism, interviewers in this corpus manifested their personal perspectives by laughing. These findings are discussed in light of current empirical research and in terms of a theory of perspectivity that conceptualizes laughter both in general and more specifically in media interviews as a nonverbal expression of personal perspective.

Keywords:
Quick links
A browser-friendly version of this article is not yet available. View PDF
Augustine of Hippo
(397/1961) Confessions. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Bachorowski, J.-A., M.J. Smoski, and M.J. Owren
(2001) The acoustic features of human laughter. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110: 1581-1597. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carroll, D.W
(2003) Psychology of language (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.Google Scholar
Chafe, W
(2003a) Laughing while talking. In D. Tannen & J.E. Alatis (eds.), Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics 2001. Linguistics, language, and the real world: Discourse and beyond. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 36-49.Google Scholar
(2003b, July) Importance of not being earnest. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies, Chicago, IL.
Clayman, S., and J. Heritage
(2002) The news interview: Journalists and public figures on the air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Clinton, H
(2003) Living history. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Darwin, C
(1872/1998) The expression of emotions in man and animals. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Duncan, Jr. S., and D.W. Fiske
(1977) Face-to-face interaction: Research, methods, and theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Glenn, P
(2003) Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Goethe von, J.W
(1809/1963) Elective affinities (trans. E. Mayer & L. Bogan). Chicago: Henry Regnery.Google Scholar
Goffman, E
(1981) Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Graumann, C.F., and W. Kallmeyer
(2002) Perspective and perspectivation in discourse: An introduction. In C.F. Graumann and W. Kallmeyer (eds.), Perspective and perspectivation in discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 1-11. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Haakana, M
(2002) Laughter in medical interaction: From quantification to analysis, and back. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6: 207-235. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Hall, G.S., and A. Allin
(1897) The psychology of tickling, laughing, and the comic. American Journal of Psychology 9: 1-44. DOI logo
Harley, T
(2001) The psychology of language: From data to theory (2nd ed.). New York: Taylor & Francis. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hecker, E
(1873) Die Physiologie und Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen. Berlin: F. Dummler.Google Scholar
Hopper, R
(1992) Telephone conversation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
James, W
(1890/1981) The principles of psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jefferson, G
no date) Some features of the serial construction of laughter. Unpublished manuscript, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
(1974) Notes on the sequential organization of laughter in conversation; onset sensitivity in invitations to laugh. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association Convention, Mexico City.
(1979) A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance declination. In G. Psathas (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington, pp. 79-96.Google Scholar
Jefferson, G., H. Sacks, and E. Schegloff
(1984) On laughter in pursuit of intimacy. Working paper Università di Urbino, no. 135, serie C.  BoP
Kowal, S., and D.C. O’Connell
(2000) Psycholinguistische Aspekte der Transkription: Zur Notation von Pausen in Gesprächstranskripten. Linguistische Berichte 183: 353-378.Google Scholar
Kuschel, K.-J
(1994) Laughter: A theological essay (trans. J. Bowden). New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary
(11th ed.) (2003) Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.Google Scholar
Mulkay, M
(1988) On humor; its nature and its place in modern society. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
O’Connell, D.C., and S. Kowal
(1998) Orality and literacy in public discourse: An interview of Hannah Arendt. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 543-564. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
(under review a) The research status of Clayman and Heritage’s (2002) The news interview. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
under review b) Uh and um revisited: Are they signals of delay? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
O’Connell, D.C., S. Kowal, and C. Ageneau
in press) Interjections in interviews. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 33:.
Provine, R.R
(1993) Laughter punctuates speech: Linguistic, social and gender contexts of laughter. Ethology 95: 291-298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1996) Laughter. American Scientist 84: 38-45.Google Scholar
(2000) Laughter: A scientific investigation. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Psathas, G
(ed.) (1979) Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Ruch, W., and P. Ekman
(2001) The expressive pattern of laughter. In A. Kaszniak (ed.), Emotion, qualia, and consciousness. Tokyo: World Scientific Publishing, pp. 410-425. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spinos, A.-M.R., D.C. O’Connell, and S. Kowal
(2002) An empirical investigation of pause notation. Pragmatics 12: 1-9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trouvain, J
(2001) Phonetic aspects of Aspeech-laughs@. In C. Cave, I Guaitella, and S. Santi (eds.), Oralité et Gestualité: Actes du colloque ORAGE, Aix-en-Provence. Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 634-639.Google Scholar
(2003) Segmenting phonetic units in laughter. In M.J. Solé, D. Recasens, and J. Romero (eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, pp. 2793-2796.Google Scholar