The functions of “just kidding” in American English

• We analyze 1200 instances of “just kidding” from five different corpora.
• We identify and explain four pragmatic functions of “just kidding.”
• The most common function found was inoculation against potential of failed humor.
• Others uses were repair of failed humor, return to serious frame, and set-up new joke.
• We interpret these functions from the perspective of rapport management.

This study is a corpus-assisted investigation concerning the functions of the formulaic sequence just kidding and its variants (e.g., only kidding, just joking, JK) in spoken and written American English. We identified 1200 instances of this phrase from multiple corpora representing a range of modalities (Contemporary Corpus of American English, Global Web-Based English corpus, The Santa Barbara Corpus, CallFriend, and MICASE) and utilized a recursive qualitative coding process that identified four different functions of the phrase (inoculation, repair of failed humor, return to serious, and set-up-new-joke). After the initial identification, we analyzed the four functions of just kidding through the lens of rapport management ( Spencer-Oatey, 2005), which assumes the ongoing maintenance of relationships between interlocutors, arguing that just kidding and its variants can serve as an important element of rapport management amongst interlocutors. Our results suggest that just kidding is pragmatically dynamic and not solely a marker of failed humor, as initially expected.