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A cross-linguistic comparison of the propositional content of laughter in American English and Central Thai

Abstract Research suggests that laughter can serve several communicative functions beyond indicating mirth, and as such, may hold propositional meaning. The present study analyzes cross-linguistic differences in the propositional content of laughter in American English and Central Thai television shows. A framework for classifying laughter by propositional content was first developed by drawing on existing literature and bottom-up analysis of the laughter found in American English and Thai shows. The framework includes categories of positive valency, negative valency, and humor, along with subcategories of disbelief, support, expressive, and pride. A multi-modal corpus of laughter was then created by compiling all laughter instances in the first 100 min of three American English television shows and three Thai television shows. The meanings of all 848 laughter instances in the corpus were categorized by propositional content of laughter. Results show that humor laughter and negative-support laughter are more frequent in American English, and positive-support laughter and negative-pride laughter are more frequent in Central Thai. These findings provide further evidence that laughter contains propositional content because they indicate that laughter use is subject to cross-linguistic variation that aligns with existing linguistic patterns and cultural values.