“Joking, kidding, teasing”: Slippery categories for cross-cultural comparison but key words for understanding Anglo conversational humor

Terms like to joke (and joking) and to tease (and teasing) have a curious double life in contrastive and interactional pragmatics and related fields. Occasionally they are studied as metapragmatic terms of ordinary English, along with related expressions such as kidding. More commonly they are used as scientific or technical categories, both for research into English and for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Related English adjectives, such as jocular and mock, are also much-used in a growing lexicon of compound terms, such as jocular abuse, mock abuse, jocular mockery, and the like. Against this background, the present paper has three main aims. In the first part, it is argued that the meanings of the verbs to joke and to tease (and related nouns) are much more English-specific than is commonly recognized. They are not precisely cross-translatable even into European languages such as French and German. Adopting such terms as baseline categories for cross-cultural comparison therefore risks introducing an Anglocentric bias into our theoretical vocabulary. Nor can the problem be easily solved, it is argued, by attributing technical meanings to the terms. Detailed analysis of the everyday meanings of words like joking and teasing, on the other hand, can yield insights into the ethnopragmatics of Anglo conversational humor. This task is undertaken in the second part of the paper. The important English verb to kid and the common conversational formulas just kidding and only joking are also examined. The semantic methodology used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which depends on paraphrase into simple, cross-translatable words. Building on the NSM analyses, the third part of the paper considers whether it is possible to construct a typological framework for conversational humor based on cross-translatable terminology.