Juokai juokais, bet šiandien juokiamės daugiau ir kitaip: juokas kaip tv ir radijo diskurso bruožas1960–2010 metais
Today We Laugh More and Differently: Laughter as a Discourse Feature in TV and radio broadcasts (1960-2010)

Summary/Abstract: As a paralinguistic element of oral communication, laughter carries a variety of social meanings: hence it can be studied as an element of public space and an indicator of on-going change. In this article, we focus on so-called laughter talk, i.e. audible laughter in the speech of discourse participants in Lithuanian TV and radio broadcasts, and examine the frequency and functions of laughter during the past five decades. The study is a corpus-based analysis of the Corpus of Lithuanian Broadcast Media, which spans over the Soviet period (1960-1987), the transitional period (1988-1992), and the commercial period (1993-2011). The corpus consists of about 60 hours of orthographically transcribed speech and covers various genres from news broadcasts to talk shows. The quantitative analysis has revealed the steady increase of laughter frequency in mediated discourse through time. This may be interpreted as an indicator of a general transition from transactional to interactional, often spontaneous communication and may be partly explained by developments in broadcast media themselves and by the evolving genre of talk shows.

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