WHO ARE YOU LAUGHING AT? YOU ARE LAUGHING AT YOURSELF! (ON LAUGHTER AS A SPEAKER’S REACTION TO THEIR OWN SPEECH ACTIVITY)

The article focuses on laughter as a paralinguistic element (PE) of an oral spontaneous monologue text. The article presents various functions of laughter as a non-verbal discursive unit on the material of 28 monologues of diff erent types (reading, retelling, description of the image, story) from the “Balanced Annotated Text Library” corpus, recorded from one informant (a woman, non-philologist student, typical extrovert). The functions include: laughter as a marker of the beginning or the end of the text; laughter as a reaction to something non-trivial in speech (not in life, which is linguistically less interesting), in particular, to one’s own linguistic creativity; laughter as a reaction to an error or speech failure. Each speech scenario was recorded from this informant 4 times, over a period of three years, with an interval of two months each, which made it possible, fi rstly, to analyze the actual characteristics of the speech of a given linguistic personality, and not the features provoked by a specifi c speech situation. Secondly, this made it possible to compare the received texts with each other in various aspects, including pragmalinguistic ones. 
The minimum of laughter as PE was found in reading monologues (0–2.46 % of the total number of tokens), the maximum — in monologues built according to the most difficult communicative scenarios: in retellings (1.92–5.6 %) and in image descriptions (1.33–6.43 %). A signifi cant number of such PEs in the studied material are cases when the speaker laughed at herself. Many of these usages are obviously polyfunctional. The results of this and similar studies can be useful in various aspects of linguistics, both theoretical (text linguistics, colloquialistics, psycho- and sociolinguistics) and purely practical (linguocriminalistics, the creation of artifi cial intelligence, etc.).