The pragmatics of conversational humour in social visits: French and Australian English Christine Béal a, * , Kerry Mullan b a Praxiling CNRS UMR 5267, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Route de Mende, Montpellier 34199, France b RMIT University, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC 3001, Australia article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Conversation Humour Pragmatics French Australian English abstract This study on conversational humour in French and Australian English investigates how speakers use humour spontaneously in naturally occurring conversations during social visits among friends. Following the four dimensional model outlined in Béal and Mullan (2013), this paper focuses on the speaker/target/recipient interplay and the various prag- matic functions of conversational humour in a number of representative examples from the two languages-cultures. For example, Australians show a marked preference for recipient-oriented humour, creating complicity with the other participants by threatening another’s face for the sake of humour. French speakers on the other hand, prefer to rein- force complicity at the expense of an absent third party via third-party oriented humour. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper aims to compare some of the ways in which Australian and French hosts and guests use humour to interact in visits between friends. It takes place within the framework of a larger project based on two comparable corpora of naturally occurring conversations recorded during social visits in France and Australia. 1 Humour is one of the many facets of social interaction which shows how interpersonal relationships are enacted, linguistically and interactionally. The first part of the paper is devoted to the theoretical framework, the data and the methodology: we briefly describe the background of analysing French and Australian English from a cross-cultural point of view and the specificity of analysing conversational humour from that perspective. Then we introduce our two sets of contrastive data and the model we have already developed to deal with the comparison of humour cross-culturally (Béal and Mullan, 2013). We show that the coupling of two dimensions of our model, the speaker/target/recipient interplay and the pragmatic functions, is particularly relevant to explore the social dimension of conversational humour. The remaining sections apply this approach to the contrastive analysis of the examples found in the two corpora: first we show that self-oriented humour is used at different points and with slightly different pragmatic functions in the two languages-cultures. Secondly we show some common points and differences: in particular in relation to face-management issues; in the various examples of humour in which the target is the addressee (humour for the sake of humour, humour as a repair politeness strategy, humour in self-defence); and finally we look at the cases where humour is aimed at an absent third-party. The concluding discussion proposes an interpretative outcome. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: christine.beal@univ-montp3.fr (C. Béal), kerry.mullan@rmit.edu.au (K. Mullan). 1 Research agreement Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, n  052296, University of Lyon 2, Montpellier 3 and RMIT, Melbourne. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language & Communication journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.09.004 0271-5309/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language & Communication xxx (2016) 1–17 Please cite this article in press as: Béal, C., Mullan, K., The pragmatics of conversational humour in social visits: French and Australian English, Language & Communication (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.09.004