Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis

Book Description
This book presents a theory of long humorous texts based on a revision and an upgrade of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), a decade after its first proposal. The theory is informed by current research in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is predicated on the fact that there are humorous mechanisms in long texts that have no counterpart in jokes. The book includes a number of case studies, among them Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Allais’ story Han Rybeck. A ground-breaking discussion of the quantitative distribution of humor in select texts is presented.


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Attardo (Youngstown State U.) explores the issue of what makes narrative texts which are longer than jokes function as . Coverage includes an overview of linguistically based humor research, a review of literature on humorous narratives, the semantic and pragmatic tools necessary to model the text, intermediate length texts sharing some of the features of longer and short texts, the tools for handling the humorous aspects of long texts, humorous texts lacking a distinct punch line, and the application of the author's method in a number of case studies from a range of genres, languages (English, French, Italian), and historical periods (1600 to the present). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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