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In this paper we investigate the role of prosodic means in framing humour within conversational narratives. In particular, we focus on whether, how, and why jab lines as basic turn constructional units in a humorous narrative turn are marked off by prosodic features. Our aim is twofold: a) to investigate, by means of statistical tests, if jab lines are systematically segmented by pauses and by differentiation in speech rate and intensity; b) to analyse the conversational and pragmatic functions of the prosodic features under scrutiny within humorous conversational narratives. The data examined comes from 3 conversations between 2 adolescent girls (different ones in each conversation) and includes 22 humorous conversational narratives. The conversational narratives contain 170 jab lines, which are checked for the occurrence of pauses before and after them, and are measured for speech rate and intensity using the Praat software. Based on the results of our quantitative and qualitative analysis, we argue that pauses surrounding jab lines and prosodic differentiation in speech rate and intensity, either in isolation or in combination with one another, are systematically employed by the narrators in order to signal, delimit, and underline jab lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of departure of this paper is the claim that dialectal variation should be approached not only as a geographical reflex but also, in line with recent discourse analytic approaches, as an interactional resource for various communicative objectives. Our analysis is based on 11 spontaneous conversational narratives produced by a Greek dialectophone from the island of Lesbos. We observe that she does not straightforwardly comply with the researcher's request to speak the (northern Greek) dialect. Rather, in order to produce dialectal features, she discursively constructs the spatio-temporal context of her village as it used to be half a century ago. It is mainly by animating, via direct speech, the voices of the foretime inhabitants of her village that she shows, rather than speaks, the local dialect. She achieves this by successfully adopting the discourse identity of performer, using devices like ellipsis, narrative present tense and prosodic differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]