Abstract
This edited volume, part of the ‘Pragmatics and Beyond New Series’ published by John Benjamins, aims to provide an up-to-date overview of linguistic research on humour for scholars and researchers with an interest in pragmatics, discourse analysis and the social sciences. In the introduction, Gurillo and Ortega provide a comprehensive overview of approaches to the study of irony and humour, including Relevance Theory, Cognitive Linguistics, and General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). The editors identify the key current research approaches, indicating how they build on earlier foundational work, as well as indicating how they relate to each other. Before outlining the content of the volume, the editors also offer a useful comparison of the entailment and functions of irony and humour. The following chapters are divided into three parts which give an account of irony and humour from pragmatic perspectives, within mediated discourse, and within conversational interaction.
The first part of the volume contains three chapters intended to give a broad overview of pragmatic perspectives on the study of irony and humour, with an emphasis on the former. The first chapter in this section, by Susana Rodríguez Rosique, adopts a neo-Gricean perspective to focus on irony, understood as the transparent and overt transgression of the maxim of quality which can affect utterances, inferences and discourse. The second chapter, by Salvatore Attardo, examines intentionality and irony by taking irony as an exemplar category and considering the ways in which irony is processed. In the final chapter in this section, Francisco Yus builds on his previous work to explain how interpretive procedures may be manipulated in order to produce humorous effects in jokes. The ‘Intersecting Circles Model’ he offers refers to the combination of three main areas of inferential activity (the actual interpretation of the joke, the ‘make-sense’ frames, and the cultural/collective mental representations) and allows the identification of seven types of jokes. Although varied in scope, the chapters in this section build on the overview given in the introduction to provide the reader with a sense of current conceptualizations of irony and humour, as well as pragmatic approaches to their study, on which future empirical research can be based.
Part two of the volume contains four chapters focusing mainly on humour in mediated discourse. The chapter by Elena Méndez-García de Paredes examines the discursive mechanisms of informative humour in Spanish media. In the second chapter, Leonor Ruiz Gurillo adopts a revised GTVH approach to analysis of the humorous monologues of Spanish comedian Andreu Buenafuente, with a special emphasis on narrative strategy. The third chapter, by Xosé A. Padilla-García, considers the pragmatic mechanisms involved in the creation and interpretation of humour through the analysis of a corpus of cartoons published in the Spanish press. The author outlines the elements involved in the creation of a cartoon from a cognitive, semantic-linguistic and pragmatic perspective before presenting original analyses of the process of recognition and understanding of comic effect, relating the reading of cartoons to different interpretation levels. The final chapter in this section, by Javier Muñoz-Basols, Pawel Adrjana and Marianne David, focuses on ‘phonological jokes’, described as verbal humour in which words or phonemes of one language are made to parody the sounds of another language. Based on their study of this type of joke in over 30 languages, the authors argue that such jokes belong to a distinct category of humour, and classify linguistic strategies within the framework of cultural, social, individual and comparative humorous contexts, identifying common features across languages, and offering useful suggestions for further research. The reader is presented with a variety of approaches and mediums in this section, which offer insights and inspiration for future research on humour in mediated discourse.
In the final part of the volume, three chapters focus on humour in conversational interaction. María Bélen Alvarado Ortega adopts a GTVH approach to study failed humour in conversational utterances in Spanish in which there is recognition, understanding and appreciation of humor. Failed humour occurs in performances where there is a lack of agreement between interlocutors on what is deemed appropriate. The author intriguingly links such failed humour to conversational strategies related to (im)politeness and face concerns, and finds that failed humour is more common amongst women than men, although perhaps more might have been made of these observations in the discussion. The second chapter, by Amadeu Viana, considers the relationship between humour and argumentation in everyday talk by exploring theoretical, methodological and empirical links. The author also calls for further research into the use of irony in dialogue. In the final chapter of the volume, Kurt Feyaerts examines the recently developed Corpus of Interactional Humor (Corinth) in order to give a socio-cognitive account of meaning, a description of the educational context in which the corpus is set and an account of the design of the corpus. This chapter is likely to be particularly interesting to humour researchers who wish to adopt a corpus approach to the study of spontaneous conversational humour.
This volume brings together a number of scholars from a range of theoretical backgrounds. As such, it offers both breadth and depth of coverage in terms of the perspectives and approaches it offers, particularly in the field of humour research; irony does not feature to the same extent in the second and third parts of the volume, perhaps due to space constraints. In addition, there is a strong emphasis on Spanish contexts, although it might have been instructive to extend the scope in this respect. Nevertheless, with up-to-date research, the volume should appeal internationally to irony and humour scholars and researchers from a range of disciplines.