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Article: Phillip Glenn: Laughter in Interaction.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Linguistics: an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences
- Article date:
- November 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Phillip Glenn: Laughter in Interaction. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 190 pp. ISBN 0-521-77206-0.
This short book is an excellent introduction to laughter in interaction, more precisely to the multiparty organization of laughter's deployment in spoken English conversation. Laughter is on the one hand nonlinguistic, lacking phonological structure, symbolic meaning, and syntax in the normal sense of these terms. Yet, as Glenn has convinced me, laughter deserves serious attention from scholars of language and its structure. One reason is its manifestation in the very organs that produce speech. It is ...