The 'Humour' element in engineering lectures across cultures: An approach to pragmatic annotation

Humour is one of the most difficult pragmatic devices for lecturers and students to engage with, and for researchers to identify systematically. Humour does not always travel well across cultures. It can cause particular problems of miscommunication for the lecturers delivering and for those students receiving it in unfamiliar cultural contexts. This paper demonstrates the use of pragmatic annotation for mapping the distribution, duration, and specific function of humour based on nine attributed types. The analysis looks at 76 English-medium lectures from the UK, Malaysia, and New Zealand, which form part of the Engineering Lecture Corpus. Differences in preferred humour type, amount, and laughter response rate are evident across the three cultural subcorpora. In the increasingly globalized academic setting, understanding of such cultural differences is important to all academics and students on the move.