Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Interactional And Cultural Pragmatics Of Evidentiality In Pastaza Quichua, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

This paper analyses the interactional and pragmatic effects of two evidential enclitics in the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. Attention is also given to represented discourse in a variety of genres. The overall goal is a better understanding of the perspectival encoding of experience through evidential enclitics and represented discourse, and the role of these devices in articulating concepts of sociability and politeness principles. A broader aim is to clarify how discourse practices making use of evidentiality and represented discourse may clarify Quichua peoples’ understandings of their relationships with each other and with non-human nature. Finally, this paper points …

Lexicography In-Your-Face: The Active Semantics Of Pastaza Quichua Ideophones, Janis B. Nuckolls, Tod D. Swanson, Diana Shelton, Alexander Rice, Sarah Hatton

Faculty Publications

English:

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language’s ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts …

Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering

Faculty Publications

The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are …