Meaning and Humour

Description

Introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour. How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersonal and textual meanings. Exploiting recent corpus-based research, it suggests that much humour can be accounted for by the overriding of lexical priming. Each chapter's discussion topics and suggestions for further reading encourage a critical approach to semantic and pragmatic theory. Written by an experienced lecturer on the linguistics of the English language, this is an entertaining and user-friendly textbook for advanced students of semantics, pragmatics and humour studies. List of figures xi List of tables xii List of illustrations xiv Acknowledgements xv Typographical conventions xvii 1. Introduction 1 1.1. About this book 1 1.2. Semantic typography 6 1.3. Jakobson’s model of communication and the metalingual function 10 1.4. An introductory framework: form, meaning, world 11 1.5. Defining the word and other lexical concepts 16 1.6. Humour, ambiguity and incongruity 21 1.7. Summary 23 2. Meaning in the language system: aspects of form and meaning 25 2.1. Levels in the language system 25 2.2. Phonology/graphology 27 2.3. Morphology: affixation 29 2.4. Re-analysis and folk-etymology 33 2.5. Compounds, collocations and idioms 37 2.6. Summary 49 3. Semantics and conceptual meaning of grammar 51 3.1. The meaning of modification 51 3.2. Epithets and classifiers 54 3.3. The of-genitive 56 3.4. The scope and orientation of modification 58 3.5. A semantic approach to syntax: Halliday and transitivity 59 3.6. An example of analysis 62 3.7. Transformations: passivisation and nominalisation 67 3.8. Ergative meanings 69 3.9. Reciprocal verbs 70 3.10. Summary 71 4. Semantics and the conceptual meaning of lexis 73 4.1. Sense relations 74 4.2. Lexical ambiguity 77 4.3. Presupposition 83 4.4. Meaning oppositions 87 4.5. Hyponymy 95 4.6. Meronymy and synecdoche 98 4.7. Componential analysis 99 4.8. Sense relations in the dictionary and in a text 102 4.9. Vague and fuzzy concepts 103 4.10. Summary and afterthought 108 5. Personal, social and affective meanings 110 5.1. Reflected meaning 110 5.2. Connotative meanings 111 5.3. Affective meaning 113 5.4. Social meaning 120 5.5. Grammar and interpersonal meanings 127 5.6. Humour and social or interpersonal meanings 130 5.7. Summary 133 6. Textual meaning and genre 135 6.1. Collocative meaning 135 6.2. Thematic meaning and information focus 137 6.3. Cohesion 141 6.4. Genre 143 6.5. A critique of traditional de-contextualised semantics, and meaning change 160 6.6. Summary 164 7. Metaphor and figures of speech 166 7.1. Terminology for metaphor analysis 167 7.2. Original and conventional metaphors 171 7.3. Conceptual metaphor theory 172 7.4. Cognitive metaphors exploited in humour 174 7.5. Metaphors and their co-text 180 7.6. What metaphors and humour have in common 185 7.7. Degrees of conventionality: semantics or pragmatics 190 7.8. Summary 192 8. Pragmatics: reference and speech acts 194 8.1. The boundaries of semantics and pragmatics 195 8.2. Symbol, icon and index 196 8.3. Reference 199 8.4. Deixis 203 8.5. Speech acts 205 8.6. Conversational analysis 216 8.7. Problems with speech act theory and conversational analysis 221 8.8. Summary 222 9. Pragmatics: co-operation and politeness 224 9.1. Grice’s co-operative principle 225 9.2. Observing the maxims: standard implicature 225 9.3. Breaking the maxims 226 9.4. Ways of breaking the maxims 228 9.5. The co-operative principle and humour theory 233 9.6. Interpersonal pragmatics: politeness and the politeness principle 236 9.7. Modesty, approbation and banter 242 9.8. Impoliteness, humour and failed humour 244 9.9. Summary 245 10. Relevance Theory, schemas and deductive inference 247 10.1. Propositions, propositional attitude and implicature 247 10.2. What is relevance? Contextual effects and processing effort 251 10.3. Relevance, deductive logic and understanding jokes 255 10.4. The relation of Relevance Theory to Grice’s theory 257 10.5. Implicature and schema theory 258 10.6. Echoic utterances and irony 265 10.7. Echoic utterances, levels of discourse and multiple voices in texts 268 10.8. Echoes and allusions 270 10.9. Jokes: echoic mentions or uses? 271 10.10. Summary 273 11. Lexical priming: information, collocation, predictability and humour 276 11.1. Predictability and information theory 276 11.2. Collocation and predictability 279 11.3. Collocation and text-linguistics 283 11.4. Lexical priming and collocation 285 11.5. Ambiguity, humour and the overriding of priming 289 11.6. Some reservations about priming theory as a theory of humour 306 11.7. Theories of humour and the meaning constraints of language 308 11.8. An afterthought and hint of a theory 312 11.9. Summary 315 Glossary 317 Notes 337 References 341 Index 350