ABSTRACT
There is a growing body of studies across a range of different language-related disciplines that indicate teasing involves a figurative cutting down or setting up of a target that is framed as playful, humorous, or otherwise non-serious by the participants. While such studies indicate that teasing is a phenomenon found across a wide variety of languages and cultures, lay terms, such as teasing and non-serious, have been used and elevated to the status of technical terms without adequate consideration of the way in which they may be masking different underlying cultural premises. Furthermore, the diverse range of practices referred to by native terms, such as vitsivitsi (lit. ‘joke-joke’) in Finnish (Haddington, 2011), razzing amongst North American Indians (Pratt, 1996), or enteab (‘tease to make angry’) and kegab (‘tease in mock anger’) amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (Schiefflin, 1986), have only been addressed in passing from an emic, cultural insider’s perspective.
