The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes (original) (raw)

CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTIC THEORIES OF HUMOUR ON THE TYPES OF HUMOUR THEORIES

The paper will discuss the following subtopics: Arthur Koestler's bisociation theory of humour and its reception; Victor Raskin's script-based theory of jokes (SSTH) in his "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor; the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo and the attempt of testing GTVH by Willibald Ruch; Salvatore Attardo's Linear Theory of Humor (IDM); The analysis of puns by Attardo; Humour and pragmatic maxims (Raskin, Attardo, etc.); Attardo's Setup-Incongruity-Resolution -model (SIR); The further taxonomy of "logical mechanisms" (LM) of jokes by Attardo, Hempelmann, and Di Maio; the "Anti-Festschrift" for Victor Raskin.

LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF HUMOUR

PROCEEDINGS OF UNIVERSITY OF RUSE, 2019

Humour, laughter, fun and situational jokes are phenomena related to intelligence and are a resul t o f the evolutional development of humans. Although there are various situations which trigger hearted laugh ter, verb al jokes and humour are considered to be more sophisticated, refined and requiring more cognitive skills and knowledge. Despite the fact that the term "humour" is largely used in everyday life, it is still hard to define it and it is even hard er to explain what makes a text a humourous one. The present paper, therefore, provi des a n o verview o f so me o f t h e contemporary theories of humour and discusses their similarities and differences by providing sp ecif ic examp les o f jokes as an illustration

A Pragmatic Study of Humor

Linguistically speaking, the concept of humor, which seems to be vast for people, has specific dimensions by which it is generated including: puns, irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and contrastive utterances in relation to the speakers of those utterances. It is about how the extra linguistics elements dominate the situation and the delivery of humor. The researchers of the present paper intend to show how the selected literary extract can be subjected to a linguistic pragmatic analysis and then be explained by applying the incongruity theory of humor by Kant (1790) in order to show the ways or the mechanisms that lead to the flouting, infringing and the violation of Gricean maxims can consequently lead to the creation of humor. Despite the fact that the present paper is qualitative in nature, some tables are provided by the researchers in order to reach into a better, deeper and more understandable analysis. Investigating the ways Gricean maxims are flouted, infringed and violated to create humor, and showing how the imperfect use of language sometimes create unintentional humor are the researchers' aims of this paper.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor

Journal of Pragmatics, 2018

Salvatore Attardo's Handbook of Language and Humor is part of the Routledge series of handbooks devoted to topics in Linguistics. As Attardo himself acknowledges in his introduction, this handbook could not have been possible three decades ago, when he started researching humor (p. 3). However, the turn of the century has demonstrated that times are now ripe for this comprehensive collection devoted to such a multifaceted and overarching phenomenon as humor. This handbook comprises 35 chapters which have not been grouped into specific subsections. However, its general structure is meaningful and well organized around a series of topics. Due to space limitations, I have concentrated on those chapters that are more likely to be of interest to the readers of this journal, and left some others aside (e.g. Raskin's 'Script-Based Semantic and Ontological Semantic Theories of Humor', L opez and Vaid on 'Psycholinguistic Approaches to Humor', Chen et al.'s 'Neurolinguistics of Humor' or Taylor's 'Computational Treatments of Humor'). Chapters 1e5 offer compelling summaries of humor theories by discussing punning in particular. Larkin-Galiñanes's 'Overview of Humor Theory' provides a thorough yet concise overview of Superiority and Disparagement, Release and Incongruity Theories. Her reflections on the way humor and laughter were denied by Christianity because they were associated with frivolity, vulgarity and sin are worth reading (6e7; cf. Trouvain and Truong in this volume for an extensive discussion on laughter). Guidi's 'Humor Universals' concentrates on humor as a universal mode of communication, which is used and/or manipulated for specific purposes (e.g. persuasion, legitimation, etc.). Recurrent patterns of phonetic similarity and their violations are shown to be markers of potential humor, which corpus-based studies can detect in a well-defined manner. Hempelmann's 'Key Terms in the Field of Humor' reviews the way terms such as 'humor' and 'wit' have come to be used in English. Moreover, corpus-based research on parallel corpora from original and translated texts can be used to show how these concepts are conveyed across language and culture (cf. also Helmpelman and Miller's 'Puns. Taxonomy and Phonology' in this volume for a similar approach). Attardo and Raskin's 'Linguistics and Humor Theory' is certainly an engaging piece of reading in its poignant defense of both Raskin's SSTH and Attardo's GTVH. The criticism of both theories arguing that script oppositions also apply to non-humorous texts is dismissed by a straightforward explanation that 'each theory comes with a purview, and it applies only to the phenomenon within this purview' (p. 52) and not all texts belong to the humor purview. Chapters 6e8 also review the main tenets of important theories of humor by looking at punning as a verbal and/or nonverbal (i.e. visual) realization of humor. Aljared's discussion of 'The Isotopy Disjunction Model' is engaging but not always easy to follow due partly to the fact that information is not well presented and signposted. That said, its value certainly lies in the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic application of IDM to a set of Arabic jokes. The findings are then compared to previous studies using IDM in American, German and Italian jokes to verify whether some similar or dissimilar characteristics can be detected. This approach can certainly reveal interesting insights on how different languages and cultures construct jokes and what their marked and unmarked features are in humor creation. Aarons's 'Puns and Tacit Linguistic Knowledge' is a clear and well-structured explanation of the mechanism at work in punning and how tacit knowledge is required to process it. A wealth of examples makes this a fitting contribution to the handbook, providing a sound overview of the issue at hand, especially when it demonstrates that ambiguity and overlapping are indeed necessary features of humorous texts like jokes. Attardo's 'The General Theory of Verbal Humor' offers the reader a sound discussion of the development and application of this theory 25 years on. Most notably, Attardo defends the validity of his theory by clarifying those concepts that, probably, were not well comprehended by fellow scholars (e.g. narrative strategy and logical mechanisms among the six Knowledge Resources informing the theory; p. 130e133). Although Attardo only briefly comments on the fact that 'Target' is sometimes a difficult knowledge resource to pinpoint within as humorous text, I am inclined to think that it deserves more attention, especially when investigating the perception of humor in texts such as (political) cartoons (Tsakona, 2009) or controversial advertising (Dore, 2018b). Chapters 11e14 consider humor from different angles, which are clearly interconnected by the approaches proposed in Stylistics and Pragmatics. Chłopicki's 'Humor and Narrative' draws on narratology and humor research to deal with the issue of detecting humor in texts longer than jokes. Simpson and Bousfield offer a concise but well-presented summary of the main

Analyzing structure and function in humor: Preliminary sketch of a message-centered model

HUMOR, 2014

Utilizing Attardo's general theory of verbal humor and Meyer's rhetorical functions of humor, as well as insights from conversation analysis, this paper presents a model linking form and function in conversational humor. In the model, an initial pair of incongruous scripts (i.e., a script opposition) is activated as membership categories are referenced in the set-up. The punch-or jab-line introduces a second script opposition that "resolves" or makes sense out of the first opposition in terms of preference organization (presenting either a preferred or dispreferred response). When examining conversational humor, those preferences have implications in terms of uniting or dividing interlocutors. If the resolution aligns with the preferred entity/activity of the set-up, then the effect should be unifying. If the resolution does not align (i.e., is dispreferred), then the effect should be divisive. The model is used to analyze two jokes and two conversa tional sequences.