Le pouvoir des rires: des interactions en face à face aux conversations par texto

Résumé

This article focuses on the interactional achievement of laughter by providing an overview of the studies we carried out on various types of settings, including institutional interactions and text-based conversations. Using a conversation analytic approach (Sacks et al. 1974), we shed light on how participants finely and systematically mobilize laughter in order to jointly achieve specific social actions such as softening corrections, producing requests or managing topic trajectories. We also show that participants recurrently laugh so as to manage the interactional troubles emerging from the ongoing talk, both in institutional and online settings. By revealing to what extent participants manage to adapt their laughing procedures to the situational and technical contingencies of the interaction in which they are involved, this article aims to promote laughter as a central part of participant's interactional competences.