Abstract
The current study elaborates on one mechanism through which teasing is accomplished in Hebrew interaction. Investigating naturally occurring casual conversation from the Haifa Multimodal Corpus of Spoken Hebrew, and employing the methodologies of Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, we explore a recurrent and recognizable practice used by Hebrew speakers – the deployment of lo ‘no’ followed by a ki ‘because’-prefaced ironic utterance. We suggest that the [lo, ki + ironic utterance] structure is a fixed format that encapsulates a practice of providing a teasing comment as a responsive action. We propose that via the use of this structure, speakers convey a negative stance of inappropriacy toward the previous action by appealing to knowledge that the recipient is obliged to know, while simultaneously mocking the recipient responsible for the inappropriacy and indirectly reproaching them for disregarding this knowledge, whether by failing to take it into account, or by a deliberate choice to ignore it.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 759-786 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | Discourse Studies |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords
- Hebrew Interactional Linguistics
- Multimodal Interaction Analysis
- Teasing
- adverbial clauses
- causality
- criticism
- irony
- mockery
- shared knowledge
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Psychology
- Communication
- Language and Linguistics
- Anthropology
- Linguistics and Language