TURN-INITIAL VERSUS TURN-FINAL LAUGHTER - 2 TECHNIQUES FOR INITIATING REMEDY IN ENGLISH ITALIAN BOOKSHOP SERVICE ENCOUNTERS

This article analyzes patterns of laughter in bookshop service encounters in England and Italy with the function of initiating remedy. Laughter sometimes occurs in the turn of a dispreferred response by the assistant (i.e., the book required is not available, it cannot be supplied, etc.), both in English and Italian. However, the preferred organization of laughter in such turns is different: In the English corpus laughter is recurrently rum-initial, anticipating an account by the assistant in the same turn, whereas in the Italian corpus it is recurrently rum-final, leaving to the customer the possibility of elicitating an account and/or an alternative solution. The different mechanisms adopted in such remedial sequences in English and Italian can provide clues to culture-specific regularities in the organization of talk in the two languages.