Authentic banter examples and their sociolinguistic analysis

What is it about?

The following paper is dedicated to a seemingly widespread interactional phenomenon and the possibilities and limitations of its analysis. Banter has been approached as a subset of teasing (Haugh 2010) or within humorous interaction (Kotthoff 1996, 2010), typically under the assumption of a continuum from bonding to dissociation. It has been discussed within politeness theory (Leech 1983, 2014, Brown/Levinson 1987, Culpeper 2011) and Goffman’s (1955) face concept. Even though all of these approaches provide us with useful insights into banter, we will always be able to find exceptions to interpretation patterns. Bonacchi (2014a) shows that due to their aggressive surface structure, banter utterances can easily lead to insulting effects, and sometimes even intentionally. Impoliteness is a necessary feature of banter’s surface structure, but neither the underlying illocution has to be aggressive nor its perlocutionary effects. Therefore, we can never tell from the lexical level alone whether aggression is actually part of a particular banter situation or not, and if so, to what extent. Banter provides speakers with the opportunity to conceal their potential aggression behind bonding components, pretending that their utterance was never meant to insult anyone. It can thus be considered a case of oblique communication (Bonacchi 2014b). Analyzing banter involves consideration of a variety of perspectives, including that of the speaker, the target(s), the audience, and sometimes even the outsider(s). The resultant interpretative variation is part of banter’s nature, for banter is about activating different layers of meaning at the same time in order to cushion a criticism, for instance, or reach humorous effects. We have to continuously collect data from real contexts to advance our concepts of banter through an approach informed by conversation analysis.

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash