Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Discourse and Text Linguistics
Fable In Action: A Discourse Analysis Approach To The Life Of Aesop, Martha Hamilton Mccafferty
Fable In Action: A Discourse Analysis Approach To The Life Of Aesop, Martha Hamilton Mccafferty
Honors Theses
In this essay, I examine instances of fable-telling throughout the Life of Aesop in a new light by using linguistic theories from the subfield of Pragmatics in my analysis. I suggest that the author’s purpose in composing the Life of Aesop is to instruct his audience on how to use fable effectively, and that Aesop serves as both the positive and negative example for this lesson. I begin by considering the nature of fable and demonstrate why it is necessary to define fable in reference to the social action which it performs. I then address the complex position of fable …
The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright
The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright
Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics
This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …
Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering
Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering
Faculty Publications
The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are …
Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo
Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo
Faculty Publications
This paper is a contribution to the study of the resolution of incongruities in humor. We reject some criticisms of logical mechanisms and analyze three different types of incongruities in humorous texts: completely backgrounded, backgrounded, and foregrounded. Only the latter are addressed by logical mechanisms. We identify a mechanism of “incongruity shifting” which may be a candidate for “deep” logical mechanism (along the lines of “parallelism” in Attardo et al. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 15: 1–44, 2002). We finally discuss the similarities between Oring's (Engaging humor, University of Illinois Press, 2003) “appropriate incongruity” theory and our approach, which …