VDM Verlag Funny Business: Verbal Humor in Business Negotiation and the Non-Native English Speaker

Non-native English speakers often have difficulties detecting humor. This book describes primarily linguistic markers of humor as evidenced in the U.S. business sector. First, the problem English learners face when encountering humor as well as the theoretical aspects of humor in the second language are discussed. This section is followed by a historical overview of humor in the USA asserting that humor is an omnipresent phenomenon in U.S. culture and therefore also an integral part of the business context in which it assumes various forms and functions and has since become an indispensable tool. The central part of the book focuses on the linguistic analysis of data from various sources with the objective of identifying semantic, syntactic, and phonological, as well as non-verbal, cues of humor. The book concludes with a summary of these overt humor markers and culminates in the proposal of 'The Humor Profile', a comprehensive framework for future data analysis, which is most relevant to ESL teachers of business communication but might also be of interest to business English students, managers and training personnel, as well as linguists and humor scholars.