Laughter and smiling: Notes on co-occurrences

This article analyses some functions of smiling in relation to laughter. Two kinds of cases are analysed. (i) Smiling can be used as a pre-laughing device: laughing together can be entered step-wise, and smiling is a common device for paving the way to the laughter. (ii) Smiling can be used as a response to laughter in the previous turn. The response can consist of just a smile or smiling can co-occur with some verbal utterance. The article shows that smiling as a response to laughter can have several interactional functions. It can be used to acknowledge the laughability of the previous turn, and sometimes even provides strong uptake of its laughability. However, smiling can also be an affiliative response to prior utterances that are constructed as delicate and troublesome (by laughter and other means). Laughter and smiling have different functions in different sequential and verbal contexts.The analysis concentrates on data from Finnish primary health care interactions and convenience store encounters. In addition, extracts of everyday telephone calls are analysed to show that smiling can also be an acoustic phenomenon and thus available also when the interactants do not have visual access to each other.