ABSTRACT
Teasing in women's friendship talk accomplishes a range of social actions such as building friendship, enhancing bonding and relieving tension. This study explores how teasing is exploited to build and strengthen friendship among Chinese female friends in Chinese Reality Television discourse, establishing a link between previous linguistic research on teasing and that on women's talk in Chinese discourse. Drawing on conversational data collected from the Mainland Chinese reality TV show, Wo Men Shi Zhenzheng De Pengyou 我们是真正的朋友 (We Are Real Friends), it illustrates how four female celebrities, known to be good friends in real life, display their friendship by using different styles of teasing. Investigation of the semantic content and pragmatic orientation of this teasing n reveals that it is characterised by a collaborative style. This is largely achieved through repetition and playing along with conversational themes. The women also adopt a non-collaborative style of teasing to reinforce their friendship, rebuking each other's points while simultaneously asserting intimacy in a discursive manner. Here, the central premise is that the interlocutors’ teasing sequences are always achieved as interactionally playful, with many salient cues that indicate both the speaker's humorous intent and the hearer's appreciation of the humour. The choices made by the four between different styles of teasing to construct friendship reflect and reinforce the normative ways that Chinese women express friendship in real-life daily interactions but also create new and different models for gender roles.
