The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains

389 Pages·2011·1.52 MB·English

by  Marta Dynel (ed.)

The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
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Editor Associate Editor
Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Würzburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin
University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara
University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of
Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies
John C. Heritage
University of California at Los Universität Basel Sandra A. Thompson
Angeles Sophia S.A. Marmaridou University of California at
University of Athens Santa Barbara
Susan C. Herring
Indiana University Srikant Sarangi Teun A. van Dijk
Cardiff University Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Masako K. Hiraga
Barcelona
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University Marina Sbisà
University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu
The University of Queensland
Volume 210
The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains
Edited by Marta Dynel
The Pragmatics of Humour
across Discourse Domains
Edited by
Marta Dynel
University of Lodz
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The pragmatics of humour across discourse domains / edited by Marta Dynel.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 210)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Humor. 2. Language and languages. 3. Pragmatics. I. Dynel, Marta.
P53.43.D98 2011
808.7--dc22 2011016545
isbn 978 90 272 5614 0 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8522 5 (Eb)
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Table of contents
Pragmatics and linguistic research into humour 1
Marta Dynel
part 1. Stylistic figures as forms of humour
1.1 Irony
Will anticipating irony facilitate it immediately? 19
Rachel Giora
“That’s not ironic, that’s just stupid”: Towards an eclectic
account of the discourse of irony 3 3
Paul Simpson
Irony via “surrealism” 5 1
Eleni Kapogianni
1.2 Puns and other wordplay
The role of syllables and morphemes as mechanisms in humorous pun formation 71
Sarah Seewoester
Context-sensitive aspects of Shakespeare’s use of puns in comedies:
An enquiry into clowns’ and pages’ punning practices 105
Magdalena Adamczyk
Dimensions of incongruity in register humour 125
Chris Venour, Graeme Ritchie and Chris Mellish
part 2. (Non)interactive forms of humour
2.1 Jokes
Displays of “new” gender arrangements in Russian jokes 147
Nadine Thielemann
 The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains
Understanding ethnic humour in Romanian jokes 173
Carmen Popescu
Sexuality in Anglo-American anti-proverbs 191
Anna T. Litovkina
2.2 Conversational humour
Joker in the pack. Towards determining the status
of humorous framing in conversations 217
Marta Dynel
Humour in quasi-conversations: Constructing fun in online sports journalism 243
Jan Chovanec
Humour and the integration of new staff in the workplace:
An interactional study 265
Patricia Pullin
part 3. Forms of humour in public discourse
Parody in the light of the incongruity-resolution model:
The case of political sketches by Monty Python’s Flying Circus 291
Maciej Kaczorowski
“I’ll be there for you!” On participation-based sitcom humour 311
Marta Dynel
“Losers, poltroons and nudniks” in Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy:
A linguistic approach to comic failure 335
Isabel Ermida
Notes on humour and persuasion in advertising and legal discourse 353
Giovannantonio Forabosco
Comic takeover or comic makeover?: Notes on humour-translating,
translation and (un)translatability 365
Delia Chiaro
Name index 379
Subject index 381
Pragmatics and linguistic
research into humour
Marta Dynel*
“Only a humorist could take humour apart, and he has too much humour to do it”
(Robert Benchley)
1. Pragmatics as the backdrop for humour research
This volume contributes to the new bourgeoning area of scholarly investigation: the
pragmatics of humour1. Over the past few decades, the importance of pragmatics has
gained headway both as a field of research on the whole and in humour scholarship.
Generally speaking, pragmatics as a discipline conflates various aspects of
language in reference to its users, i.e. speakers or writers and hearers or readers
(Levinson 1983). Additionally, it explores the “inter-relation of language structure
and principles of language use” (Levinson 1983: 9). The first part of the definition ac-
cords with Morris’s 1938 view of pragmatics, which he proposed as a branch of semi-
otics besides syntax/syntactics and semantics. He defined pragmatics as the study of
the relationship between signs and their users alongside psychological, sociological
and biological factors germane to the functioning of these signs. While many of
* I would like to thank those scholars who reviewed the individual papers, as well as Julia Stelter,
John Crust and Sarah Seewoester, who proofread some of the chapters. I am also grateful to Neal
R. Norrick and Andreas Jucker for their encouragement. Last but not least, I owe special thanks to
Anita Fetzer and Isja Conen for their invaluable help throughout the publication process.
1. Notwithstanding the fact that terms such as “funniness”, “amusement” and “laughter” re-
verberate in the whole volume, it is individual language users that make personal judgements on
what is funny, amusing or laughable, whilst the concept of humour is recognised as being a cat-
egory independent of idiosyncratic evaluations (cf. Carrell 1997). Incidentally, when considered
in academic terms, humorous phenomena tend to lose their potential to induce amusement and
laughter (the prototypical signal of humour appreciation, albeit sometimes also independent of
it, for instance if indicative of anxiety). This is obviously not because researchers lack sense of
humour (cf. Robert Bentley’s witticism), but because, preoccupied with the nature of humorous
concepts, analysts only aim to recognise and dissect data and are usually not in the right frame
of mind to enjoy them.
 Marta Dynel
these factors are nowadays subsumed under other linguistic disciplines, such as
psycholinguistics or neurolinguistics (Levinson 1983), they are still relevant, if not
central, to pragmatic investigation.
Indeed, many a handbook (e.g. Green 1989, Mey 1993, Cummings 2005,
Verschueren 2009) places emphasis on the multidisciplinary nature of pragmatics,
which is informed by other disciplines, not only linguistic ones. However, despite its
heterogeneous nature, pragmatics constitutes a distinct realm of linguistic study, con-
tributing postulates and proposals (e.g. deixis, presupposition, the Gricean model and
implicitness, or speech acts) which can benefit other fields. Besides these basic notions
which pervade pragmatic literature, innumerable topics pertinent to communication
are explored under the label “pragmatics” (e.g. politeness and impoliteness, interac-
tional framework, intentionality, gendered discourse, metaphor, or humour), which
can be appreciated on the basis of extensive tables of contents in international prag-
matic journals. Methodologically and thematically diversified studies merge into
abundant scholarly output on communication, specifically written and oral text pro-
duction and reception in numerous discourse domains and genres.
Overall, pragmatics is a field addressing communicative processes (or language as
deployed by its users) and its relation to language form, coupled with the cognitive and
socio-cultural study of language use. In other words, pragmatics presents a wide inter-
disciplinary spectrum of topics capitalising on the interactions of cognitive, social, and
cultural phenomena and processes (cf. Verschueren 2009). This also presents itself in
the emergence of subdisciplines, notably sociopragmatics and cognitive pragmatics.
The field’s intrinsic diversity is also manifest in pragmatic humour studies. On the
whole, the past few decades have witnessed intensive development in research into
humour within a number of disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, philosophy and
even medicine. Linguistic humour research is particularly prolific and can hardly be
exhaustively summarised (see overviews in Attardo 1994, Dynel 2009a and Norrick
2010), insofar as it displays innumerable topics and approaches, frequently borrowed
from ample literature on “non-humorous” language. Regardless of their methodolo-
gies and specific objectives, linguists with interests in pragmatics aim to describe cho-
sen types, functions and mechanisms of humour as a communicative phenomenon.
The current interest in verbal humour, i.e. humour conveyed by language rather
than non-verbal stimuli (Raskin 1985, Attardo 1994, Alexander 1997, Norrick 2004,
Dynel 2009a), is largely credited to Victor Raskin. His 1985 publication marked a wa-
tershed in linguistic research into humour by launching the Semantic Script Theory of
Humour, which further developed into the General Theory of Verbal Humour
(e.g. Attardo and Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994, 2001). Both are anchored in semantic,
cognitive and pragmatic theory, thereby delineating the multidisciplinary orientation
of humour research. The Semantic Script Theory of Humour is hinged on the presen-
tation of a joke as a text, at least partly, compatible with two opposing semantic scripts.
Those were originally understood as chunks of semantic information evoked by cho-
sen words, such as the prototypical “doctor” and “lover” scripts, which Raskin (1985)
Pragmatics and linguistic research into humour 
and followers claim to underlie this joke2: “‘Is the doctor at home?’ the patient asked in
his bronchial whisper. ‘No,’ the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply.
‘Come right in.’”. Built also on the notion of script overlap and opposition, the General
Theory of Verbal Humour centres on six hierarchically organised knowledge resources
(besides script opposition, these are: language, logical mechanism, situation, target
and narrative strategy), according to which canned jokes and humorous short stories
can be analysed and compared. The two theories are still hotly debated, being either
endorsed and expanded upon by other authors (e.g. Ermida 2008) or criticised for
their methodological shortcomings (e.g. Ritchie 2004, Dynel 2009b).
In this volume, Nadine Thielemann deploys Raskin and Attardo’s model in her
original research into Russian gendered jokes, indicating that it fails to capture certain
dissimilarities in new jokes which subvert stereotypes underlying traditionally gen-
dered jokes. On the other hand, Carmen Popescu uses Raskin’s notion of a script in her
unprecedented study of ethnic scripts in Romanian jokes. The concept of script op-
position/overlap also reverberates in Isabel Ermida’s contribution on comic failure in
Woody Allen’s prose, combined with the incongruity-resolution model (which is suc-
cinctly introduced below). Interestingly, Raskin and Attardo are divided on the issue
of whether their approach is compatible with the incongruity-resolution framework,
with the former author unequivocally dissociating himself from it, and the latter being
supportive of it (for a discussion, see Dynel 2009b).
Needless to say, the analysis of jokes and humorous short stories is not restricted
to the theoretical framework put forward by Raskin and Attardo, but may, for instance,
be devoted to qualitative and/or quantitative studies of jokes’ topics, yet not conceived
as scripts. In this volume, Anna T. Litovkina conducts a sociopragmatic inquiry into
the topic of sexuality and its subordinate categories in antiproverbs (short jokes based
on allusions to proverbs) of Anglo-American origin.
Moreover, research into jokes frequently concentrates on their on-line develop-
ment (e.g. Ritchie 2004, Dynel 2009b). Regarding pragma-cognitive incremental pro-
cesses underpinning jokes (and all humour in general), most researchers concur that
the main prerequisite is incongruity (see e.g. Attardo 1994; Forabosco 1992, 2008; Mar-
tin 2007; Dynel 2009b) understood in psychology as a deviation from the cognitive
model of reference, or, from a linguistic viewpoint, a mismatch or contrast between
two meanings. A query arises as to how humorous incongruity can be differentiated
from its non-humorous counterpart. In this volume, Venour, Ritchie and Mellish for-
mulate an innovative hypothesis bringing us closer to finding an answer to this in-
triguing question.
What is more, the prevailing view is that, notwithstanding its strength, incongruity
is humorous only if followed by resolution. Broadly speaking, the incongruity-resolution
model, initially championed by Suls (1972, 1983) and Shultz (1972), assumes that
2. It can be argued, however, that the joke relies on “patient” and “lover” scripts (see Dynel
2009b).