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Categories are inference-rich and do implicative work storing a great deal of knowledge that members of a society have about the society. Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, and sequential analysis from Conversation Analysis, this study explores participants' categorial orientations in talk-in-interaction that is produced and/or treated as humorous in the Second Language (L2) classrooms. More specifically, this study presents an in-depth analysis of the way category-activity puzzles, which display incongruous combination of membership categories and category-bound activities, are formed, and made relevant and consequential in talk that is produced and/or treated as humorous. In doing so, it unpacks how participants invoke, negotiate, and deal with category-activity puzzles as resources for producing and/or treating utterances as humorous in L2 classrooms. The analysis will also illustrate the way participants use their understanding of common-sense knowledge and category memberships as a resource in managing and negotiating incongruities created through category-puzzles, which are treated as humorous. As such, this study contributes to the growing body of MCA and humor studies in classrooms and advances our understanding with regards to the categorial orientations of participants in L2 classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tasting sessions are a social activity in which the senses and the sensorial features of the tasted objects are the main focus of the participants, who do not only experience taste but also aim at precisely describing it. For doing that, they use pre-formatted tasting sheets and pre-existing standardized repertoires of descriptors. This paper investigates the relations between bodies and sensations, linguistic expressions and the normativity of lexical repertoires. While the literature has insisted on the sensorial lexicon of diverse languages and its specialization within expert domains, the very way in which the sensing body, language, and the normativity of standardized categories are precisely articulated in tasting practices remains understudied. Using an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, this paper demonstrates how participants in training tasting sessions achieve practically, bodily and materially the association between the sample tasted, the sensing body and the use of lexical repertoires. Artefacts and tools like tasting sheets and lexical lists are situatedly mobilized in a way that enhances the senses but also socializes and standardizes them. On the basis of cheese tasting sessions video-recorded during training workshops of professional tasters in Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland, the paper demonstrates how the normative order of sensing is achieved through the imbrication of the use of tasting sheets within the sensory examination of samples – thus showing how body, materiality, language, and artefacts are normatively constrained, practically managed and bodily aligned in the tasting session. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]