Sometimes a frog in your throat is just a frog in your throat: Gutturals as (sometimes) laughter-implicative

Jefferson (1979, 1984, 1985, 2004, Jefferson et al., 1987) has in a series of papers described the ‘interactional machinery of laughter’, documenting its sequential co-construction. In this paper, data are discussed where guttural sounds produced by one participant are treated as laughter-relevant by a co-participant, who then laughs in response. Sometimes, however, the guttural features can have quite different causes (e.g., the frog in the throat) and treating them as laughter-relevant misconstrues the other's talk. The paper shows the work participants may do in subsequent talk to put things to rights; i.e., on the one participant's part to show that no laughter was intended, and on the co-participant's part to show understanding thereof.