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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Linguistics

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Faculty Publications

Communication

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Resolutions And Their Incongruities: Further Thoughts On Logical Mechanism, Christian F. Hempelmann, Salvatore Attardo Jan 2011

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 …


Sound Symbolic Involvement, Janis B. Nuckolls Jun 1992

Sound Symbolic Involvement, Janis B. Nuckolls

Faculty Publications

This article examines an iconic form of communication, sound symbolism, which has been associated with oral cultures and implicated in paradigms of primitive mentality, I argue that Lowland Ecuadorean Quechua speakers use sound symbolic iconicity to create interlocutionary involvement. A speaker's performative foregrounding of a sound symbolic form simuhtes the salient qualities of an action, event, or process, and thereby invites a listener to project into an experience. This projected involvement, in turn, points the listener to deeper kinds of imaginative, intellectual, and emotional engagement with the narrative. The argument is based on an analysis of the formal and semantic …