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Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics

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 …


Timing In The Performance Of Jokes, Salvatore Attardo, Lucy Pickering Jan 2011

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 …


Engaging In Another Person’S Telling As A Recipient In L2 Japanese: Development Of Interactional Competence During One-Year Study Abroad, Midori Ishida Jan 2011

Engaging In Another Person’S Telling As A Recipient In L2 Japanese: Development Of Interactional Competence During One-Year Study Abroad, Midori Ishida

Faculty Publications

This study investigates the development of interactional competence through the analysis of conversational data collected in a longitudinal design. It examines, using conversation analysis (CA), how a learner of Japanese as a second language (L2) engages in conversation as a story recipient, and identifies changes that suggest the learner’s development.