Phonetics as a laughing matter

Laughing is a phonetic activity that is often observable in spontaneous discourse. Forms of laughter go far beyond a "haha"-like vocalisation with a great variability regarding duration, fundamental frequency, voice quality, and intensity. In contrast to common belief that laughter has nothing to do with linguistic aspects of phonetics there is evidence that laughter can be strongly tied to linguistic structure, e.g. in speech-laughs or as discourse markers for topic termination or as shared vocalisation in turn transitions. Based on data of conversational corpora we argue that laughter plays an important role also for phonetics and that it deserves more detailed research from the perspective of production, acoustics, and perception.