The Pragmatics Of Humour Across Discourse Domains

Brings together a range of contributions on the linguistics of humour. This title elucidates the whole gamut of humorous forms and mechanisms, such as surrealist irony, incongruity in register humour, mechanisms of pun formation, as well as interpersonal functions of conversational humour

This edited volume brings together a range of contributions solely on the linguistics of humour. Rather than favour one approach, this collection of articles gives a state-of-the-art picture of current directions in pragmatic humour studies. The contributors assume multifarious theoretical perspectives and discuss a wide array of issues germane to different types of humour across discourse domains. Consequently, the whole gamut of humorous forms and mechanisms are elucidated, such as surrealist irony, incongruity in register humour, mechanisms of pun formation, as well as interpersonal functions of conversational humour. In addition, the papers address diversified manifestations of humour, such as puns in Shakespeare’s plays, gendered jokes on the Internet, sexuality in anti-proverbs, Woody Allen’s prose, humour in “Friends”, and parody by Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Most importantly, the chapters offer new research findings and advocate novel theoretical conceptualisations of humorous phenomena, drawing on the wealth of existing scholarship. Therefore, the volume is bound to serve as a well of knowledge and inspiration for both seasoned and beginning researchers with interests in the pragmatics of humour.

This book offers a cognitive-pragmatic, and specifically relevance-theoretic, analysis of different types of humorous discourse, together with the inferential strategies that are at work in the processing of such discourses. The book also provides a cognitive pragmatics description of how addressees obtain humorous effects. Although the inferences at work in the processing of normal, non-humorous discourses are the same as those employed in the interpretation of humour, in the latter case these strategies (and also the accessibility of contextual information) are predicted and manipulated by the speaker (or writer) for the sake of generating humorous effects. The book covers aspects of research on humour such as the incongruity-resolution pattern, jokes and stand-up comedy performances. It also offers an explanation of why ironies are sometimes labelled as humorous, and proposes a model for the translation of humorous discourses, an analysis of humour in multimodal discourses such as cartoons and advertisements, and a brief exploration of possible tendencies in relevance-theoretic research on conversational humour.

Language and Humour in the Media provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse analysis, connecting two areas of scholarly interest that have not been studied extensively before. The volume adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, concentrating on the various roles humour plays in print and audiovisual media, the forms it takes, the purposes it serves, the butts it targets, the implications it carries and the differences it may assume across cultures. The phenomena described range from conversational humour, canned jokes and wordplay to humour in translation and news satire. The individual studies draw their material for analysis from traditional print and broadcast media, such as magazines, sitcoms, films and spoof news, as well as electronic and internet-based media, such as emails, listserv messages, live blogs and online news. The volume will be of primary interest to a wide range of researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, intercultural studies, pragmatics, communication studies, and rhetoric but it will also appeal to scholars in the areas of media studies, psychology and crosscultural communication.

This volume presents recent developments in the linguistics of humour. It depicts new theoretical proposals for capturing different humorous forms and phenomena central to humour research, thereby extending its scope. The 15 contributions critically survey and develop the existing interpretative models, or they postulate novel theoretical approaches to humour in order to better elucidate its workings. The collection of articles offers cutting-edge interdisciplinary explorations, encompassing various realms of linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and language philosophy), as well as drawing on findings from other fields, primarily: sociology, psychology and anthropology. Thanks to careful overviews of the relevant background literature, the papers will be of use to not only researchers and academics but also students. Albeit focused on theoretical developments, rather than case studies, the volume is illustrated with interesting research data, such as the discourse of television programmes and series, films and stand-up comedy, as well as jokes.

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in interactional humour from social and pragmatic perspectives, with fascinating results. Released more than a decade later than Norrick and Chiaro (2009) Humor in Interaction, The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts gathers some of the most recent work on humour in interaction, with contributions taking (meta)pragmatic approaches to the analysis of various genres of interactive humour in both online and offline settings. This volume illustrates that a range of methodologies and perspectives can be applied to the study of such a complex phenomenon. These include analyses with a cognitive orientation and with multimodal approaches, work based on Relevance Theory, the General Theory of Verbal Humour, and Conversation Analysis, among others. In addition, all the authors represented here are recognised experts on the subject, and in most cases, are leading specialists in their respective fields. The book can be of use not only to scholars who study the linguistics of humour in interaction but also to students who wish to pursue research in the area.

This book attempts to discuss selected but thorny issues of humor research that form the major stumbling blocks as well as challenges in humor studies at large and thus merit insightful discussion. Any discourse is action, so the text-creation process is always set in a non-verbal context, built of a social and communicative situation, and against the background of relevant culture. On the other hand, humor scholars claim that humorous discourse has its special, essential features that distinguish it from other discourses. The pragmatic solution to the issue of potential circularity of humor defined in terms of discourse and discourse in terms of humor seems only feasible, and thus there is a need to discuss the structure and mechanisms of humorous texts and humorous performances. The chapters in the present volume, contributed by leading scholars in the field of humor studies, address the issues from various theoretical perspectives, from contextual semantics through General Theory of Verbal Humor, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, to Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor, providing an excellent overview of the field to novices and experts alike.

Wordplay involving several linguistic codes is an important modality of ludic language. This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the topic, discussing examples from different epochs, genres, and communicative situations. The contributions illustrate the multi-dimensionality, linguistic make-up, and the special interactive potential of wordplay across linguistic and cultural boundaries, including the challenging practice of translation.