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Semantic Mechanisms of Humor

  • Book
  • © 1984

Overview

Authors:
  1. Victor Raskin

    1. Purdue University, USA

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Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (SLAP, volume 24)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xix
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  2. Survey of Humor Research

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 1-44

  3. Theory

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 45-58

  4. Semantic Theory

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 59-98

  5. Semantic Theory of Humor

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 99-147

  6. Sexual Humor

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 148-179

  7. Ethnic Humor

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 180-221

  8. Political Humor

    • Victor Raskin
    Pages 222-246

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 247-284
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Keywords

About this book

GOAL This is the funniest book I have ever written - and the ambiguity here is deliberate. Much of this book is about deliberate ambiguity, described as unambiguously as possible, so the previous sentence is probably the fIrst, last, and only deliberately ambiguous sentence in the book. Deliberate ambiguity will be shown to underlie much, if not all, of verbal humor. Some of its forms are simple enough to be perceived as deliberately ambiguous on the surface; in others, the ambiguity results from a deep semantic analysis. Deep semantic analysis is the core of this approach to humor. The book is the fIrst ever application of modem linguistic theory to the study of humor and it puts forward a formal semantic theory of verbal humor. The goal of the theory is to formulate the necessary and sufficient conditions, in purely semantic terms, for a text to be funny. In other words, if a formal semantic analysis of a text yields a certain set of semantic proptrties which the text possesses, then the text is recognized as a joke. As any modem linguistic theory, this semantic theory of humor attempts to match a natural intuitive ability which the native speaker has, in this particular case, the ability to perceive a text as funny, i. e. , to distinguish a joke from a non-joke.

Reviews

`...this is an interesting and provocative book on an important topic of interest to those interested in pragmatics...'
Linguistics, 23:6

Authors and Affiliations

  • Purdue University, USA

    Victor Raskin

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Semantic Mechanisms of Humor

  • Authors: Victor Raskin

  • Series Title: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6472-3

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland 1984

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-90-277-1821-1Published: 31 December 1984

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-94-009-6474-7Published: 12 November 2011

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-009-6472-3Published: 06 December 2012

  • Series ISSN: 0924-4662

  • Series E-ISSN: 2215-034X

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XIX, 284

  • Topics: Semantics

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