Frame-shifts in Action:

What Spontaneous Humor Reveals about Language Comprehension

Ying Choon Wu
Cognitive Science, UCSD
Correspondence to:
Ying Choon Wu
Cognitive Science, Dept. 0515
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0515
USA
ywu@cogsci.ucsd.edu
fax: 1-858-534-1128
phone: 1-858-822-4037
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Abstract
Getting a joke involves revising initially primed expectations. Coulson
(2001) describes the cognitive work underlying such revisions as frame-shifting or
accessing and restructuring elements from distinct knowledge in order to draw
critical inferences. The present talk examines evidence for frame-shifting in
spontaneous humor. Drawing upon video-recorded conversations, I will demonstrate
how much of what is treated as invisible, backstage cognition in written joke
comprehension can in fact be mapped to visible, overtly executed behaviors in
spontaneous jokes. It will be shown how frames are collaboratively constructed over
sequences of contributions to the talk in progress. Further, it will be shown how
selectively highlighting elements within a given frame is achieved by various
semiotic resources such as body orientation, pauses, and eye gaze. Finally, it will be
shown how participants accompanying talk and actions serve to cue the required
conceptual revisions (frame-shifts).
Introduction
The study of spontaneous humor in the wild affords the opportunity to
investigate the intersection between language and social processes. Drawing from
collections of published or well known witticisms, researchers have argued that
getting verbal humor frequently requires the integration of information from
distinct knowledge domains or schemas (Coulson 2001, Norrick 1986). For
example, grasping the joke in a line such as, The diamond is the hardest stone - to
get, is contingent upon the projection of relational structure between ones cognitive
models of courtship and precious stones. However, as will be demonstrated over
the course of this discussion, analysis of the actual production of spontaneous jokes
in everyday dyadic interaction suggests that joke comprehension involves an
additional form of conceptual work namely, the participants must re-construe the
mutual focus of their interaction. Consider the following example:
Two long-standing friends (a man and a woman) are sitting outside facing
one another as they discuss crab bait. In response to the mans query as to
why she uses turkey legs, the woman responds, Because I have turkey legs.
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The man replies, I know you have turkey legs, and glances ostensively at
her legs.
Just as dual senses of hitting a home run are brought to bear in the previous
example, so the mans remark in the present case invites a semantic reanalysis of the
sense of turkey legs suggested by the womans statement. However, for all other
parties involved, understanding that a joke has been made involves not only
reanalysis at the linguistic level; it is also necessary to demarcate the remark as
distinct from the preceding strip of activity with respect to the participants goals,
attitudes, standards of conduct, and so forth. Whereas the talk preceding the mans
reference to turkey legs appears to be motivated at least in part by the opportunity for
the earnest exchange of information, his response to the woman does not seem
designed to express any sort of sincere opinion about the nature of her legs. For
example, it would be markedly odd if, construing his statement as such, the woman
were to respond with additional leg-related exposition, as though the topic of the
conversation had simply shifted abruptly from crab bait to human limbs. It would
also be unexpected if she were to take deep offense at the negative implications of
his comment. In other words, knowing that the man is joking entails not only
semantic reanalysis, but also revising the backdrop of assumed motivations and
potential next moves informing the ways in which his remark is to be interpreted
relative to what has already transpired in the exchange.
These two forms of conceptual revision correspond to two distinct notions of
frame-based knowledge. On the one hand, knowing the kinds of legs denoted by the
phrase turkey legs when attributed either to humans or fowl requires that ones
knowledge of both leg types be sufficiently structured so that one can re-
conceptualize one leg type (human) in terms of the other (turkey). Many current
theories on the nature of such knowledge structure are based at least in part on
notions of frames and schemas formulated in the 1970s by researchers in the fields
of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive psychology (Minsky 1975, Schank & Abelson
1977, Bobrow & Norman 1975, Rumelhart & Ortony 1977). On the other hand,
knowing that the man is only kidding with his comment requires that one re-
conceptualize what was previously a serious form of activity as now having turned to
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play. The premises and perspectives necessary for the members of a culture to
perform this kind of interpretive shift has also been termed frames by sociologists
(Goffman 1974, Bateson 1972).
The present discussion will explore how these two types of frame-based
reanalysis complement one another. In particular, it will be shown that when studied
in the context of face-to-face exchanges, the comprehension processes treated by
some humor researchers as purely mental events confined to the minds of individual
readers are in fact in coordination with and perhaps scaffolded by overt behavioral
cues (eye gaze, body orientation, pauses, and so forth) which serve to organize the
ongoing strip of activity in which the humorous utterance is lodged. In other words,
because situated verbal jokes require some form of reanalysis both with respect to
the semantic domain afforded by the language of the joke itself as well as with
respect to the participants construals of the interchange in progress, a situation
emerges whereby the environmentally grounded resources which speakers draw
upon in order to evoke the understanding that they have made a joke facilitate the
conceptual revisions necessary to grasp the implicit humor. This finding bears
significance not only to the realm of verbal wit; it speaks to the broader question of
the interrelationship between social cognition and the conceptualization processes
necessary for language comprehension. As will be shown, constructing a mental
model of an interlocuters intended message depends not only on the scope and
organization of ones semantic knowledge; it is also determined by the participants
dynamically shifting understandings of the purposes and protocols which inform
their talk in progress.
Background
Frames and Frame-shifting in Written Jokes
A frame in the present sense of the term is an abstract construct postulated in
the attempt to account for peoples ability to draw upon prior experience in order to
arrive at inferences about new objects and events encountered in the environment. If
one sees a dining room chair partially occluded by a table, for example, one expects
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by default that it has four legs even though they may not all be visible. Similarly,
ones familiarity with the procedures, or scripts (Schank & Abelson 1977) involved
in restaurant dining enables the following two sentences to be construed as cohesive
and intelligible, even though no intervening explanation of the manager or the
intention to order beer was made available:
1) John and Frank went out for pizza after work.
1) The manager turned out to be one of Johns neighbors, and gave them a
free pitcher of beer.
What is at stake, in essence, is the individuals ability to supplement his
representation of current input with relevant pre-existing knowledge in order to
arrive at an enriched understanding of the situation at hand.
The idea of frames or schemas was developed in order to describe the
architecture of a memory system capable of mediating this precisely kind of
integration between stored and incoming information. Specifically, frames and
schemas are conceptualized as data structures which are stored in long-term memory
and represent the essential constituents and relations comprising a stereotyped
situation, object, action, event or sequence. In the case of a restaurant frame, for
example, core constituents might include the patrons, the waiter/waitress, and the
meal around which their interaction hinges. Core relations are illustrated in the
intuition that the meal be consumed by the patrons and served by a waiter or
waitress, as well as in the temporal order of the steps in the transaction (patrons are
seated by the waiter and given menus; beverages are ordered; beverages are served
and entrees are ordered, and so forth).
In addition to representing what is most characteristic about a given category
of experience, frames and schemas are also proposed to possess variables, or
slot/filler structure, which can be specified by novel instantiations of that category.
Receiving (1) and (1) as input, for instance, is presumed to activate a restaurant
frame with John and Frank being mapped as fillers of something like a PATRON
slot, and the pizza, as a filler for the MEAL slot. Slots which are not specified by the
information available are said to be filled by default values. We assume, for
example, that the two gentleman receive their pizza from a food server rather than
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fetching it out of the kitchen themselves, even though no references to an agent for a
putative FOODSERVER slot was made. In a similar fashion, it is the default values
within an individuals chair frame which allow him to predict that there are four legs
beneath a specific chair within his field of vision even when they are occluded by a
table.
Although frame-based models have received apt criticism for their inability
to represent the breadth and subtlety of commonsense human knowledge (see
Dreyfus (1997) for a discussion), some core tenets of the theory have found
empirical support. Bower, Black, & Turner (1979), for example, demonstrate that
after reading short vignettes narrating habitual activities or events (e.g. a trip to the
doctor), participants recalled and falsely recognized actions which were not overtly
described in the text, but nevertheless implied by the organization of the routines
motivating each story. Sanford & Garrod (1981) had individuals read short passages
which either evoked a well defined scenario, such as a trial in court, or a more
generic form of interaction (e.g. telling a lie).
Appropriate scenario
Title: In court
Fred was being questioned (by a lawyer).
He had been accused of murder.
Target: The lawyer was trying to prove his innocence.
Inappropriate scenario
Title: Telling a lie
Fred was being questioned (by a lawyer).
He couldnt tell the truth.
Target: The lawyer was trying to prove his innocence.
They observed that target sentences referring to entities who would figure
prominently in the appropriate well-defined scenario required less reading time
precisely when cues suggesting that scenario were present. These findings suggest
that situation specific knowledge including representations of characteristic roles,
relations, settings, material objects, and so forth is accessed during the
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comprehension of the texts utilized in these experiments. If titles such as, In
court, and phrases such as ...accused of murder do indeed serve to activate
something along the lines of a court trial frame, with pre-specified slots for legal
counsel and defendants, we would expect references to components of that frame to
exact a reduced processing cost relative to cases where a court trial frame was not
cued. Likewise, if descriptions of habitual activities are encoded in long term
memory as instantiations of generalized action schemas, then we would expect
memory tests to yield intrusions and false recognition of actions specified by the
underlying schema, but glossed over in the text. On the basis of arguments such as
these, Sanford & Garrod conclude that reading (and perhaps language
comprehension in general) fundamentally involves accessing applicable domains of
stored knowledge and building a mental representation of the message encoded in
the text by means of the structure which they provide.
Coulson (2001) argues that the importance of underlying frames to
comprehension is particularly apparent in the appreciation of joke. Consider the
following example:
The replacement player hit a home run with my
Understanding this partially completed sentence requires that the reader integrate the
information cued by the linguistic items with preexisting knowledge about baseball.
To know that hit refers to forceful physical contact between a ball and a bat demands
knowledge about typical practices and props involved in the game. Similarly, to
know that a home run is a fortuitous event and that a replacement player is not a
regular team member demands knowledge about rules governing how points are
scored and teams, composed. In essence, then, the readers stored knowledge about
baseball can be said to constitute a structured representation, or frame, on the basis
of which he can draw inferences about how to conceptually model what is
linguistically encoded in the sentence.
Now consider the following joke completion:
The replacement player hit a home run with my girl.
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In this case, grasping the gist that the speakers girlfriend has cheated on or left
him requires the reader to access an entirely different knowledge domain namely,
that associated with romantic relationships. Significantly, though, this frame-shift
from baseball to romance is accomplished by means of relational similarities
between elements within each domain. Just as hitting a home run in baseball entails
scoring points which increase the likelihood of winning the game, so hitting a home
run in a new encounter involves positive interaction between two parties such that
the likelihood of future encounters is increased. Likewise, just as a replacement
player in the baseball frame temporarily takes the place of a regular team member, so
the replacement player in the romance frame supplants the regular boyfriend. What
is necessary to get this joke, then, is not only accessing the relevant knowledge
domains, but also effecting a shift whereby initial presuppositions are reanalyzed and
causal and relational mappings between distinct knowledge domains are drawn.
Certainly, the notion that jokes involve the frustration of initial expectations
and a shift between contrasting conceptual domains has been proposed in previous
research (Norrick 1986, Kreitler, Drechsler, & Kreitler 1988). Koestler (1964)
describes this shift in terms of the notion of bisociation:
The pattern underlying both [funny] stories is the perceiving of a
situation or idea...in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of
reference... (p. 35)
What Coulson raises with respect to this line of thinking is the possibility that the
habitually incompatible frames of reference may not be so incompatible after all.
In keeping with research by Kreitler et al, the shift in focus from baseball to romance
may play an essential role in the perceived funniness of the joke. However, the joke
is comprehensible precisely because the readers knowledge of these two topics is
sufficiently similar in structure. Hitting a home run with a girl makes sense as a
description of romantic success because our conceptualization of a play in baseball
involves procedures (pitch, swing, run), contingencies (hit, fly, strike), and outcomes
(score, out), which can be mapped metaphorically to what is conceptualized as
regular in the early stages of a courtship (procedures associated with going on a first
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date, the resulting impressions which one makes, the outcome of getting a second
date or not, and so forth).
Frames and Frame-shifting in Spontaneous Conversational Jokes
When studying verbal humor as it is produced between two or more
individuals, it is necessary not only to account for the mental processes which enable
them to grasp what is funny in a linguistically encoded message, but also to account
for the processes which enable them to infer the consequences of that message for
the shape of the interaction in progress. Bateson (1972) formulated this problem in
terms of the metacommunicative signals necessary for any type of animals engaged
in play to understand the non-serious nature of their activity. The playful nip, he
writes, denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite (p.
180). Goffman (1974) incorporates this idea of metacommunicative signaling into
his use of the term key, which he defines as follows:
I refer here to the set of conventions by which a given activity, one already
meaningful in terms of some primary framework, is transformed into
something patterned on this activity but seen by the participants to be
something quite else (p.43).
Here, primary frameworks can be understood as the information which an
individual draws upon in order to make sense out of his subjective experience of
events and to organize his own behavior in response. As an illustration, individuals
are capable of co-constructing sustained collaborative activities, such as a game of
checkers, in part because they share common background understandings of goals
and procedures, of behaviors that should be construed as meaningful or ignored, of
signals for opening and closing the activity, as well as for demarcating it form other
concurrent activities, and so forth. However, it is also possible through keying to
produce an activity which exhibits features of a checkers game, such as compliance
with certain procedures and the use of certain material artifacts, but which is
differently framed insofar as it is motivated by different goals and demarcated in
different ways and hence associated with different patterns of regulated behavior
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on the parts of both players and observers as in the case of a demonstration of a
checkers game, or a contest, or a staged game occurring in a play.
Frames in the sense of the term developed here (to be called interactive
frames from here on) are similar in some regards to the concept of frames discussed
in the previous section (to be called knowledge schemas from here on) even to the
point of overlapping. For example, at least some of the knowledge which Goffman
claims necessary to recognize a checkers game in progress such as knowledge of
the procedures for playing would comprise essentially the same stored data
structure which Artificial Intelligence research might describe as a checkers frame.
However, interactive frames differ from knowledge schemas on the crucial point that
they are fundamentally relational: they are brought to bear whenever a person enters
into a relationship with another object, person, group, or event. Knowledge schemas,
by contrast, reflect structure which is not contingent upon the presence of any
external entity. An important implication of this distinction is that interactive frames
are constituted not only by the background understanding which participants bring to
the interaction, but also by the ways in which they regulate and tune their behavior
(see Kendon 1990 for a discussion). In the checkers example, the participants
shared recognition of the game derives not only from the kinds of knowledge
described in the preceding paragraph, but also from the ways that they make visible
to one another their compliance with this knowledge, as in the case of following a
strict turn taking sequence and making only legal moves.
For the remainder of this discussion, my goal is to demonstrate how the
metalinguistic cues, or keys, which speakers use in order to signal a switch from
serious to joking conversation also influence the course of conceptual processing
relative to the content of the joke itself. In particular, it will be shown how pauses,
eye gaze, and body orientation modulate the following kinds of conceptual work
necessary to joke comprehension:
1) drawing correspondences between structurally analogous elements of
distinct knowledge schemas
2) selecting contextually relevant mental representations of messages from a
range of possibilities
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The implications of these findings are two-fold. First, within the province of humor
studies, they suggest a critical role for timing and orientation in the delivery of
spontaneous jokes. Secondly, within the broader arena of language related research
in general, they represent an attempt to integrate the methodologies applied in
conversation analysis with theoretical developments within the field of cognitive
linguistics. While conversation analysts have studied in considerable detail the
organization of talk and interaction, relatively little attention has been devoted to the
effects of such organization on the conceptual and linguistic processes mediating
language comprehension. Of course, the difficulty of collecting on-line indices of
such processes during spontaneous, natural conversation prohibits certain forms of
investigation. However, with the present discussion I hope to demonstrate that
building an ecologically valid theory of language comprehension requires the
acknowledgement that such comprehension never transpires in a vacuum. In the
context of face-to-face interaction, a range of extras-linguistic resources are available
for facilitating communication, such as gesture, visible displays of directed attention,
and the purposeful manipulation of material artifacts. Ultimately, accounting for
how individuals alter each others mental representations through speaking entails
accounting for how they have framed their encounter, and how they attribute
meaning not only to the linguistic elements of their utterances, but also to the broad
range of additional cues utilized in talk.
Procedures
Approximately three hours of natural conversation were recorded among
individuals engaged in a range of collaborative activities (farm chores, chatting in the
shade after cutting firewood, telling stories during a party). All participants gave
informed consent to be videotaped. Humorous utterances were identified on the
basis of listener reactions, such as laughter or facetious responses, and transcriptions
were made of the strips of interaction in which these utterances were embedded. For
the purposes of the present analysis, an attempt was made to include in the transcript
the following three segments: the joke itself, the participants reactions to these
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jokes, and the history of antecedent exchanges preceding the joke and extending
back to the most recent topic shift. The excerpts below comprise two of the three
instances of verbal jokes involving frame-shifts (in the sense of the term explicated
by Coulson (2001)) observed in the data.
Mosquito bites and horse bites
Figure 1
theres these little gnats that have been ( 3) biting her again
The following excerpt was recorded while Karen and her daughter, Angela,
tend to their two horses, Kate and Koley. Karen has finished applying insect
repellant lotion from squeezable bottle onto Koleys back, and is waiting while
Angela brushes gnats away from the horses face. Kate is in the adjacent pasture.
The point of central interest is lines 10 and 11, where Karen builds upon the
syntactic structure of Angelas utterance in order to create a new unit with somewhat
different semantic properties and implications.
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Angela appears to have construed Karens addition in line 11 as a joke rather than an
expression of bona fide concern: she echoes Karen (Except for Kate. Yeah.) with
simultaneous overtones of laughter, rather than making any acknowledgement of the
potentially problematic nature of this circumstance. What enables her to apprehend
Karens statement as funny?
The conceptual reanalysis triggered by Karens retrospective inclusion of
Kate within the category of biters is certainly one relevant factor. In line 10 (There.
nothing can bite you now.), Angelas use of bite seems to denote the specific
kind of biting performed by parasitic insects that is the kind of biting which usually
results in mild discomfort and superficial damage, which is performed for parasitic
purposes, which often occurs without the recipients awareness, and so on.
Furthermore, the scope of nothing does not seem intended to encompass all
organisms capable of biting, but rather, seems delimited precisely to that class of
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organisms which bite in the manner described above. Significantly, since there are
no overt linguistic cues in her utterance suggesting this type of interpretation, it is
necessary to consider the string of overlapping actions preceding line as the
motivation for these intuitions. First, with respect to the material environment, both
participants are engaged in purposeful activities at the outset of the segment: Angela
is brushing away gnats (lines 1-8), and Karen is reading the label on the bottle of
insect repellent (lines 5-11). Part of what enables one to identify these tasks as such
is the participants visible displays of body orientation and directed attention: Karen
is holding the bottle almost upright at chest height and has fixed her gaze on some
location on its surface; Angelas body orientation shifts in synchrony with the
horses head movements, allowing her to continually re-establish contact with the
area around its eyes. Furthermore, both participants reveal through their talk
something of their own construal of the purpose of their actions: Karen describes
properties of the lotion which she presumably learned from the label (It even repels
ticks (1) and mosquitoes); Angela states in lines 1-2 , We:ll theres these little gnats
that have been (3) biting her. Im just wiping em off. In sum, then, simply
attending to the situation of a speakers body within his immediate surround and to
the content of his talk enables an observer or interlocuter to draw critical inferences
about the focus of that persons activity and it is this kind of awareness which is
proposed to constrain the interpretation of bite in line to an insect-specific
representation.
In addition to the observable activities in which Karen and Angela are
engaged, a second way in which their prior interaction constrains the interpretation
of line 10 is the conceptual activity which they index through their talk. In
particular, the exchanges in lines 1-6 show that the two women have collaboratively
delineated an ad hoc category (Barsalou 1986) of insects which are affected by the
repellent. A few turns later, in line 10, the properties of biting associated with this
specific class of entities are still likely to be more strongly activated by the term bite
than other aspects of ones knowledge of biting; and hence, one would expect a bias
for an insect-specific interpretation. In other words, it is being argued that through
talk, Angela and Karen jointly establish a class of entities which share certain
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features of relevance to the immediate situation and the process of doing so affects
the kinds of semantic activation elicited by subsequent exchanges.
Thus far, it has been shown how environmentally grounded, publicly visible
activity, as well as conceptual activity indexed by talk, can serve as a context which
biases interpretation. Given this assumption, understanding Karens remark in line
11 (except maybe Kate) entails a frame-shift whereby the scope of nothing must
be expanded beyond the category of parasitic insects, and an insect-biased construal
of bite is revised according to stored-knowledge about horse-instigated biting (e.g. a
visible action executed by means of the jaws and teeth, manifesting aggression, and
potentially inflicting harm). As suggested by empirical studies of authentic and
modified jokes rated for degrees of funniness (Kreitler et al 1988), it is this
unexpected shift from a contextually biased domain which affords her comment
comic connotations.
Yet, as argued at the outset of this paper, this conceptual shift and
ultimately, the success of her joke is mediated not only by the incompatibility
between horse- and insect-biased biting schemas, but also by physically perceivable
cues which enable Karens comment to be construed as play. Of course, a variety of
such cues can be identified, including elements of voice quality, posture, and facial
expression which signal a calm emotional state in spite of the potentially
troublesome nature of the situation to which she alludes. However, for present
purposes, the analysis will focus on those cues which demarcate her comment as
distinct from the immediately preceding activity. One example can be found in the
temporal alignment between Karens articulation of line 11 and her subsequent
removal of the insect repellant bottle from her primary field of vision an act which
overtly signals a shift of attention away from the contents of its label. A second
example can be found in her orientation to the participation framework established
by Angelas preceding turn. Angela utters line 10 ( there. nothing can bite you
now.) while leaning in towards Koley at eye level and tugging on the halter; her use
of the second person pronoun as the object of bite implicates the horse as the
addressee. By contrast, Karens attention seems to be focused on the insect repellant
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bottle at the point of uttering line 11 (except maybe Kate), since she continues to
hold it in front of her at an angle suitable for reading. Furthermore, she makes no
attempt to integrate her body position or the formulation of her talk with the dyad-
like framework which her daughter has established relative to the horse and
through this course of action, the inference is made available that the goals and
attitudes motivating her utterance of line 11 are discontinuous from those motivating
Angelas utterance of line 10.
A final example of information which signals discontinuous motivations is
the one second pause separating lines 10 and 11. As can be seen in the transcript,
the preceding talk (lines 6-9) comprises two pairs of short turns which are executed
in rapid succession, interspersed by pauses of approximately 15 milliseconds or less.
This tight temporal coordination can be argued to index the participants reciprocal
attunement to the activity presently mediated by their talk. For example, Goodwin
(1992) shows how syntactic and prosodic regularities associated with the production
of assessments allows for sequential overlap between participants respective
contributions. Consider the following example:
Figure 2
there. nothing can bite you now
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Dianne: Jeff made en asparagus pie
it wz s : : so : goo:d
Clacia: I love it.
Goodwin (1992) argues that the presence of the intensifier and the noticeable
lengthening of the sounds which comprise it enable Clacia to construe Diannes
immediate talk as the opening of a collaborative assessment activity, and thus to
produce her own evaluation of the same material even before Dianne has finished.
This claim has important implications for the idea developed by Goffman (1963) that
in certain forms of interaction (or face engagement) participants join each other
openly in maintaining a single focus of cognitive and visual attention what is
sensed as a single mutual activity, entailing preferential communication rights (p.
89). In Goodwins (1992) example, the single focus of cognitive...attention, or
the shared sense of a single mutual activity is proposed to be the assessment of
asparagus pie and evidence that this sense of shared focus or mutual activity
genuinely is shared is proposed to be found in the overlap between Dianne and
Clacias utterances. Clacia is able to express her own evaluation with respect to the
topic early because she knows that Diannes talk is directed toward a similar
purpose. With respect to Angela and Karen, it appears that their rapid succession of
turns in lines 6-10 signals a similar sense of shared understanding with respect to the
primary focus or foci (in Goffmans sense of the term) of their talk. Furthermore, the
pause before line 11 is proposed to signal a disintegration of this joint attunement.
Insofar as Karen is no longer concerned with addressing Koleys vulnerability to
insect bites, but is attempting to make a joke, a new mutual activity is being
introduced and must be accommodated to by Angela.
Thus far, the discussion has sought to show how subtle elements of speakers
behavior during focused encounters can suggest a shift in how their interaction is to
be framed, or construed. In the present case, these elements include Karens
coordination of her utterance with actions which signal the coda of a previously
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relevant activity, her maintainence of physical distance from the object of Angelas
visual attention (i.e. Koley), and her creation of temporal distance between her
current turn in progress and the immediately antecedent talk. Clearly, sensitivity to
cues such as these is important for Angelas ability to know that their talk has shifted
to a form of play which, though coherent with their earlier exchanges, is no longer
seriously directed toward the collaborative resolution of a problem and which
therefore, warrants a certain kind of appropriate response (laughter as opposed to
concern). However, as argued at the outset of this discussion, these cues also
facilitate the conceptualization processes necessary to get Karens joke. Her pause
before uttering line 11, for example, allows for decay of the insect-biased construal
of bite conjectured to be activated in line 10 and in this way, the likelihood of this
construal of being re-analyzed in a manner consonant with Karens joke is increased.
Furthermore, sensitivity to cues which signal a new trajectory of focus is proposed to
result in a re-allocation of cognitive resources from maintaining attunement with the
current activity to framing the parameters of the new one. Again, this proposed re-
allocation of resources is likely to result in the decay of conceptual models elicited
by just prior talk, and hence increase the likelihood of a new construal at the
opportunity for re-analysis introduced at line 11.
Turkey Legs
This segment was recorded during a visit from John to his friend, Lucy. In
lines 5-6, the apparent focus of their conversation changes course from crab bait to
the effectuation of a jibe about Lucys legs. In a manner similar to the horse biting
joke, Johns remark in line 5 echoes the syntactic structure of Lucys preceding
utterance, though intending a different sense of what it means to have turkey legs.
John makes these communicative intentions visible by consistently directing his gaze
towards Lucys legs until she produces overt signs of having accomplished the
desired re-analysis (Are you talking about my legs?).
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Figure 3
well I kn ow you have turkey legs
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The conceptual work mediating this re-analysis is another example of frame-
shifting. Building a mental model of the situation described in Lucys statement
(but I have turkey legs) presumably involves access to stored knowledge about
features of turkey legs which make them suitable as crab bait (e.g. edible, small
enough to fit in the trap, readily available, and so forth). Given this kind of
information, one is likely to infer that Lucy is using the phrase turkey legs to refer to
a specific portion of turkey meat and bone typically purchased in the grocery store
and processed by a butcher from the original legs of live turkeys. Furthermore, to
have turkey legs in this context is likely to be interpreted in the sense of alienable
possession one assumes that they are somewhere accessible to Lucy, but not
necessarily present on her person. On the other hand, grasping the alternative
meaning suggested in Joes response ( well I know you have turkey legs)
demands that have be attributed a sense of inalienable possession and that turkey legs
be treated as a descriptive reference to Lucys legs. By analogy to the baseball joke
analyzed earlier, the negative connotations implicit in this remark emerge from
relational mappings between the two contrasting knowledge schemas made available
in this exchange. One must know, for example, which parts of the butchered meat
product correspond to the ankle, shin, and thigh regions of a human leg; which parts
correspond to flesh and which, to bone; and so forth. Through the process of
conceptual integration (Fauconnier & Turner 1998, 2002), it is possible to
imaginatively represent a human leg with soft tissue distributed in a manner
resembling a turkey leg.
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Yet, this blended representation does not appear to be available to Lucy until
line 7, when she is visibly smiling after Joe has erupted in laughter. Her aborted
question (what dyou use fer- ) in line 6 suggests that before this point, she treats
the entire strip of interaction as a conversation devoted primarily to crab bait. Since,
presumably, her question was intended to ask about Joes crab catching practices,
this utterance is in keeping with the topic of their earlier exchanges. Furthermore,
her choice of lexical items and syntactic structure parallels that of Joes question in
line 1, and she turns to face him before speaking in much the same manner as in lines
2 and 4. In sum then, her conceptual, linguistic, and physical orientation is coherent
with patterns established during earlier turns as they first began discussing the issue.
By contrast, insofar as line 5 constitutes a reference to Lucys legs with playfully
negative connotations, Joe has introduced an abrupt change in both the topic and
desired outcome of their conversation. In keeping with this new trajectory, he also
produces changes in facial expression and gaze orientation much of which appears
directed toward effecting this shift in their joint understanding of the focus of their
talk (i.e. poking fun at her rather than discussing crab bait). At the end of his turn
in line 5, for example, Joe assumes and maintains a persistent grin until Lucy has
gotten the joke. Furthermore, in line four, after she states, But I have turkey
legs, Joes gaze shifts from Lucys face to her legs and remains fixed there
throughout line 5. Also, in the three second silence between lines 5 and 6, he
saccades from Lucys eye level (she is just in the process of turning to face him) to
her legs; and then, once they establish eye contact as she begins to articulate line 6
(figure 4), Joe initiates a second saccade, which Lucy follows with her own gaze
(figure 5), resulting in a coordinated shift of joint attention to her legs.
1 J:
wha dyou use fer bait?
6 L:
what dyou use fer-
23
24
It is this shift in attention which enables Lucy to grasp the discontinuity between
Joes comment and their preceding talk. Her subsequent response after looking up
(are you talking about my legs?) indicates that at this point, she has
accomplished the targeted semantic reanalysis; the smile which emerges as Joe and
the investigator burst out laughing, as well as the heightened displays of joint
attunement which follow (e.g. periods of prolonged face-to-face orientation (lines 7-
10) and overlapping turns (lines 9-10) both indicate that she has reframe their
previously earnest talk as a form of play.
Given this pattern of behaviors, it becomes clear that shifting the focus of
their activity from discussing crab bait to making jokes is a collaborative process
mediated, in this case, by the participants mutual awareness of their partners gaze
and orientation. At the outset of the transcript, bouts of mutual orientation when
both participants face each other and secure eye contact (lines 2 & 4) are interspersed
with instances when they do not face each other and appear to be fixating on
indeterminate loci in anterior space (lines 1 & 3). By contrast, in line 6, Joe
establishes eye contact with Lucy, and then while still facing her, saccades to her
legs. In other words, he visibly displays that he is redirecting his attention and it is
the contrast between this focused display of redirected attention with his previous
pattern of alternating face attunement and disengagement which is proposed to
constitute a sufficiently significant cue to Lucy that she terminates her utterance
midway through and re-channels her gaze along the path of his saccade. Thus, her
ability to follow the new course of conversation which Joe introduces with the
conceptual content of line 5 depends critically on her sensitivity to cues that his
focus of attention has changed. Furthermore, this sensitivity is not only important to
understanding changes in the trajectory of their activity; it is also crucial in enabling
her to perform the conceptual work necessary to getting Joes joke. Understanding
the object of his gaze to be her own legs enables her to draw the cross-domain
mappings between the representation of turkey legs elicited by her utterance in line
4 and a representation of human legs in order to arrive at the blended representation
implied in Joes use of the term.
25
Conclusion
Sanford and Garrod (1981) sought to demonstrate the role of knowledge
schemas in language comprehension by testing the amount of time subjects required
to read scenarios preceded by titles designed to activate such hypothesized schemas.
The goal of the present study has been to show how in spontaneous, every day
conversation, physically perceivable cues which participants produce in order to
demonstrate their orientation to a particular activity in progress may modulate
language comprehension in a manner similar to the titles in Sanford and Garrods
(1981) laboratory based reading experiment. In Karen and Angelas exchange, for
example, the individual actions which comprise the collaborative activity of
grooming Koley, including wiping away gnats, applying, insect repellent, discussing
its insect repellent, and reading the label on the bottle, are all proposed to bias
listeners to an insect-specific mental representation of the action of biting. It is also
argued that in addition to biasing semantic construal, information which indicates a
shift in the shared focus of an activity also facilitates the complex reanalysis
processes necessary for joke comprehension. In Karens case, the temporal and
spatial distance (relative to the immediately preceding talk) associated with her
utterance of the phrase, Except for Kate, are argued to signal the possibility of a
decrease in her attunement to the focus of the current talk in progress and hence the
potential for the introduction of a new trajectory. At the same time, these cues are
also hypothesized to promote the decay of the mental representation activated by
Angelas use of the term bite, and thus to increase the likelihood of new, horse-
rather than insect-biased construal of the term being activated by Karens joke.
Similarly, in the turkey legs example, Joes visible shift of gaze is argued both to
prompt the understanding that the focus of their conversation has changed, but also
to enable Lucy to revise her conceptualization of the referent of the phrase, turkey
legs. These findings are important not only for understanding differences between
the comprehension of spontaneous and canned jokes, but also for understanding the
comprehension of spontaneous language in general. Environmentally grounded
resources which speakers draw upon in order to organize conversations and other
26
collaborative activities also modulate the conceptualization processes underlying
meaning construction.
[ or [ ] Actions performed by speaker or listener simultaneously with talk
bold increased loudness
:: lengthened segments
decreased loudness, whisper
? question intonation
<> simultaneous talk and laughter
. sentence final intonation
(1) pause (length in sentences)
overlapping talk or coordinated face orientation
= absence of pause
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