Book review: Amanda Bateman and Amelia Church (eds), Children’s Knowledge-in-Interaction: Studies in Conversation Analysis

Abstract

However, no book or theory is perfect and this handbook is no exception. There seems no comprehensive theory which can account for verbal humor across different cultures and discourses. Take GTVH as one case. Originally born out of SSTH, GTVH was designed to describe the structure and nature of humorous texts, building out of six knowledge resources which have undergone persistent and abundant scrutiny in the past decades. But, with more approaches entering the complex humor research picture, the future for GTVH, as Attardo comments in Chapter 10, is that ‘more knowledge resources may be added or an independent theory of performance may be devised’ (p. 138). For instance, based on the inferential strategies of relevance theory, Yus (Chapter 14) refines the Intersecting Circles Model, which is capable of analyzing simple humorous utterances or long narratives, and is even applicable to multimodal analysis of cartoons or advertisements. More significantly, nearly all the studies in the handbook are carried out within English contexts and discourses (except Chapter 16, on Russian discourse). Thus, a question arises: can we generalize the models and theoretical frameworks for dealing with verbal humor to all other societies, cultures and ethnic groups? If research on humor was conducted based on Chinese data, for example, it seems some different features could be found and the findings might pose a challenge to the existing theories proposed so far for explaining humor in the literature. Nevertheless, this handbook is a must-read reference for scholars who are interested in humor research from interdisciplinary perspectives. To be specific, it may appeal to any scholar who is pursuing linguistic research on humor in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, literary translation, psychology, or other social sciences with particular interest in this ubiquitous and distinctive human trait. Readers will certainly have a better understanding of the development in the theories, proposals, models for treating verbal humor in research of the past decades and recent years. The handbook will stimulate more inspiration for the persistent investigation of humor in human language and communication.