Salvatore Attardo

• Texas A&M University – Commerce

Although American news satire trends towards the left side of the political spectrum, satire is not unique to liberal viewpoints. Conservative news satire, published by outlets such as The Babylon Bee, lend evidence to the ability for right-wing views to be advanced using satirical methods. Despite political differences, existing comparisons of lef...

Memes occupy a central position in the culture of the internet, which is at the center of contemporary culture. Therefore it is crucial to understand how memes can be used for political purposes. A basic issue is that, in the process of production of the variants of a meme, the contents of the meme change. I refer to these changes as memetic drift....

The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought offers the first comprehensive collection of chapters in multidisciplinary irony scholarship. These chapters explore the significance of irony, both verbal and situational, in language, thought, human action, and artistic expression. They cover five main themes: the scope of irony in human experience; iro...

In this paper we discuss two development of the smiling intensity scale (SIS), a scale developed to assess the intensity of smiling (with laughter as the upper end of the scale). SIS has several advantages, vis-à-vis using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), including being simpler and faster to implement and notably cheaper, while being equall...

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in interactional humour from social and pragmatic perspectives, with fascinating results. Released more than a decade later than Norrick and Chiaro (2009) Humor in Interaction, The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts gathers some of the most recent work on humour in interaction, with contributio...

Participation in experimental studies can be conceptualized as Goffmanian frames, i.e. a set of rules which include the fact the experimenter will be observing participant behavior through (the recording of) the experiment. This study is focused on frame breaches in 16 video- and audio-recorded dyadic conversations taking place in an experimental s...

Humor and language varieties characterize everyday interactions and because of their relevance and ideological force, official guidelines and experts have advocated for them to be integrated in the language curricula. However, much work still needs to be carried out to explore ways to simultaneously implement humor and linguistic diversity in the l...

In this paper we present the results of both a theoretical and empirical study on the evaluative character of verbal irony. Our main research concern was to provide evidence as to whether all cases of verbal irony are ‘critical’ in nature or not, trying to corroborate the findings outlined in previous work (e.g. Alba-Juez [1996] 2001 and 2000) not...

This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access – for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language – to the...

In this paper we examine the order of processing of multimodal tweets (text + image). Using an eye tracker, we collected a sample of 36 participants reading 25 humorous tweets. Our conclusions show that the processing of multimodal humorous tweets is in line with the processing of other multimodal texts. The participants were significantly more lik...

The second part of the discussion of humor in conversation focuses on the functions of humor in conversation and thus has more of a discourse analysis (DA) focus. The work of major DA scholars in humor is examined. Conversational humor is examined in several settings, including conversations among friends, medical encounters, and the workplace. Wor...

The chapter considers research on the effectiveness of humor to improve classroom performance. Humor is found to improve the perception of the teaching experience but not the actual performance of the students (learning, retention). Classroom discourse analysis is also examined, in particular the amount and distribution of humor in lectures and cla...

This chapter considers applications of the linguistics of humor to literary texts. It considers in particular applications of the Semantic-Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and the General theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), under two approaches: the expansionist approach, which applies the SSTH as is to larger texts, and the revisionist approach, which int...

This chapter discusses the semiotics of humor. Semiotics considers signs of any kind, not just linguistic ones. The distinction between denotative semiotics and connotative semiotics is introduced. Humor is a connotative semiotics and it thus shares some of the features of connotative semiotics, such as the defunctionalization of the sign (i.e., me...

This chapter opens the first part of the book on humor studies (chapters 1-5). It addresses the persistent problem in humor studies of terminological definition. It explain why there has been a consensus on using the term “humor” as an umbrella term subsuming all forms of humor (joke, irony, ridicule, mockery, wit, whim, puns, etc.). It further est...

This chapter considers the translation of humor. Several approaches to humor translation are considered, including the faithfulness approach, functional translation, Zabalbeascoa’s priority scales and solution types, Eco’s translation as negotiation, Skopos theory, and Relevance theory. Translation of particular types of texts is also addressed inc...

As the title indicates this is the first part of the discussion of humor in conversation. The focus is on Conversation Analysis (CA). The chapter starts with a discussion of CA methodology, which is quite different from that used in previous chapters, and then focuses on the analysis of laughter in conversation and on the definition of laughable. T...

This chapter concludes the discussion of the performance of humor by addressing the variationist approaches to the sociolinguistics of humor. Among the topics discussed are humor and gender, social class, age, and the uses of dialects associated with humor. The chapter also considers the universality of humor, which is attested in all human societi...

The chapter begins by defining the fundamental distinction between competence and performance and introduces various methodological approaches used in the linguistics of humor, with a focus on the principle of commutation. The problem of identifying humor is then addressed, including a review of traditional “markers’ of humor (i.e., laughter). A tr...

This chapter introduces the third section of the book, dedicated to the performance of humor (as opposed to competence) or using another term to the sociopragmatics of humor. It starts out with a discussion of the performance of humor (in a theatrical sense), including standup comedy. The rest of the chapter presents the Hymes-Gumperz sociolinguist...

This chapter deals with puns. The classification of puns is discussed and a basic definition of pun is provided: a text in which a sequence of sounds must be interpreted with a formal reference to a second sequence of sounds and two incongruous meanings are triggered by this process. Puns may come from ambiguity, or paronymy (puns that are similar...

This chapter opens the second part of the book on humor competence (chapters 6-9). This chapter introduces Raskin’s semantic theory of humor competence based on scripts (Semantic-Script Theory of Humor, SSTH). The concept of script (or frame) is introduced. Dynamic scripts (i.e., scripts that are updated with new informatiom) are described as well...

The conclusion wraps up the multiple arguments in the body of the book by arguing that humor studies needs a complex theory, in the sense of complexity theory and a trans-disciplinary approach that takes input from all relevant disciplines to explain humor.

The General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) is introduced. It is also a model of humor competence based on jokes, like the SSTH, which it incorporates, but it is broader as it includes six Knowledge Resources: the Script Opposition (from the SSTH), the Logical Mechanism, which describes the resolution of the incongruity in the script opposition, the...

This book is the first comprehensive systematic introduction to the linguistics of humor. Assuming no background in humor studies at all, and an elementary knowledge of linguistics, all the terminology and conceptual apparatus of humor studies are introduced, as well as all the linguistic concepts necessary to understand the most up-to-date formula...

In this article I review the history of various approaches to semantics that share the premise that meaning is (to a greater or smaller extent) encoded in semantic “objects” (scripts, frames, schemata, MOPs, etc.) and their relations (semantic graph). I compare the various approaches, highlighting in particular the common, shared elements of Object...

This book is a basic English grammar, based on decades of teaching. It is organized around two core points: 1) the discovery of grammatical regularities, and 2) language variation. The first core point uses both a top-down approach, using a set of simple discovery procedures (heuristics), and a bottom-up approach, in which the learner is invited to...

Language Learning, Discourse and Cognition: Studies in the tradition of Andrea Tyler comprises a collection of original empirically and theoretically motivated studies at the nexus of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and second language learning. The thematic relationships between these subfields and links between the studies are laid out...

The present article is part of a larger cross-cultural research project on speaker-hearer smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous conversations in American English and French. The American corpus consists of eight computer-mediated interactions between English native speakers, and the French one consists of four face-to-face interactions betw...

This article reviews some of the universal features of humorous wordplay which include the phonological mechanisms used to manipulate strings, the semantic oppositeness found in incongruity, the pseudo-logical Cratylistic resolution of the incongruity, and the relative distribution of types of wordplay involving different types of ambiguity and all...

This study investigates the function of smiling intensity as a non-discrete marker of humor in conversation. The smiling intensity of participants in eight conversational dyads was measured relative to the occurrence of humorous and non-humorous events in the conversation. A relationship was found between higher smiling intensity and the occurrence...

Two important methodological lessons are highlighted, using examples from Christie Davies' work: the significance of negative evidence and of terminological precision.

This workshop introduces a set of tools and methods to perform a multimodal analysis of humor in spoken discourse. The hands-on approach will provide the attendees with practical materials, templates, and procedures to perform methodologically sound analyses. No prior knowledge assumed. All materials included.

This review introduces readers to Gender and Humor: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives, a collection of essays from various disciplines and topics in the field of humor and gender studies, encompassing different countries and languages.

Despite much research on the role of humor in the L2 classroom (see Bell, 2017; Bell & Pomerantz, 2016 for reviews), the conclusion of several major meta-analyses of the field of humor and teaching (Martin, Preiss, Gayle, & Allen, 2006; Banas, Dunbar, Rodriguez, & Liu, 2011; McMorris, Boothroyd, & Pietrangelo, 1997) is that, as Bell and Pomerantz (...

https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/ivitra.14.12gir/details

Participants in face-to-face interactions rely on visual as well as verbal clues to coordinate and accomplish collaborative actions (Clark, 1996), and may use, for example, smile and laughter to signal that a certain utterance should be interpreted in a humorous way (Clark, 1996: 370). Research has shown that, contrary to what folk theories of humo...

This paper addresses whether and how humor is performed in conversation by analyzing facial expressions and gaze patterns of speakers engaged in dyadic face-to-face interaction. For the purpose of this study, pragmatic intentions are defined as arising and being negotiated by speakers in interaction, rather than existing a priori and being simply i...

We empirically test the capacity of an improved system to identify not just images of individual guns, but partially occluded guns and their parts appearing in a videoframe. This approach combines low-level geometrical information gleaned from the visual images and high-level semantic information stored in an ontology enriched with meronymic part-w...

It has been widely assumed that the full meaning of a linguistic expression can be grasped only within a situation, the context of the utterance. There is even agreement that certain factors within the situation are particularly significant, including gestures and facial expressions of the participants, their social roles, the setting of the exchan...

This present article is part of a larger study on speaker-hearer allocation of attentional resources in face-to-face interactions. The goal of the paper is twofold: first, we present results concerning the degree of correlation, in computer-mediated conversation, between speaker’s timing and intensity of smiling when humor is either present or abse...

Identifying partially occluded (hidden) objects is necessary in security or intelligence systems when visually monitoring an area for weapons and assessing the level of threat they pose. In real-life situations, such as when a weapon is held in the hand, over the shoulder, or in a suitcase or bag, some of the weapon will necessarily be occluded. Ex...

In the present paper we study the problem of weapon identification and threat assessment from a single image with a partially occluded weapon. This problem poses very severe restrictions. To successfully identify a weapon from its parts we extend the first firearm ontology with the meronymic (partonomic) principle which lets us distinguish parts of...

The work that established and explored the links between visual hierarchy and conceptual ontology of firearms for the purpose of threat assessment is continued. The previous study used geometrical information to find a target in the visual hierarchy and through the links with the conceptual ontology to derive high-level information that was used to...

This study focuses on the multimodal conversational markers of eye gaze and smiling in conversation. Specifically, it explores the role of smiling as a significant device in verbal communication (Attardo et al, 2013) by utilizing eye-tracking array technology and a smiling intensity scale based on FACS (Ekman and Friesen 1978). In the first part of...

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 355-362

The present work is part of an ongoing larger project.2, 3, 11, 12 The goal of this project is to develop a system capable of automatic threat assessment for instances of firearms use in public places. The main components of the system are: an ontology of firearms;1, 14 algorithms to create the visual footprint of the firearms,1, 14 to compare visu...

An application of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) to the theory of humour translation is presented. The GTVH is presented as a theory that allows us to relate perceived differences between jokes to six hierarchically ordered Knowledge Resources (parameters), namely knowledge concerning Language; Narrative Strategies; Target(s); Situation...

In this chapter we present the results of both a theoretical and empirical study on the evaluative character of verbal irony. Our main research concern was to provide evidence as to whether all cases of verbal irony are 'critical' in nature or not, both by means of theoretical reflection and by presenting the results of a survey whose questions wer...

The paper presents the analysis of the humor found in four dyadic conversations. The results of the conversational data match those of previous studies (Pickering et al., 2009): no differences were found in volume or speech-rate between humorous pause units and non-humorous ones. Similarly, pauses were not found to mark humorous turns. However, the...

The present work is a part of a larger project on recognizing and identifying weapons from a single image and assessing threats in public places. Methods of populating the weapon ontology have been shown. A clustering-based approach of constructing visual hierarchies on the base of extracted geometric features of weapons has been proposed. The conv...

This paper presents an approach to identify a weapon from a single image using a weapon ontology. Ontological nodes selected by experts store convex hull (CH) sequences for their descendants, whereas the ontological leafs are labeled with object boundary sequences. The latter are generated from object boundary vertices, while the CH sequences are g...

This is the first-ever book-length collection of articles on the subject of prosody and humor. The chapters are written by the recognized leaders in the field and present the cutting edge of the research in this new interdisciplinary field of study. The book covers a broad range of languages, using several theoretical approaches, ranging from cogni...

2. Prosody and humor (by Attardo, Salvatore) 4. Recognizing sarcasm without language: A cross-linguistic study of English and Cantonese (by Cheang, Henry S.) 5. Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation (by Attardo, Salvatore) 6. Prosody in spontaneous humor: Evidence for encryption (by Flamson, Thomas) 7. Formulaic jokes in interact...

This paper presents a further step of a research toward the development of a quick and accurate weapons identification methodology and system. A basic stage of this methodology is the automatic acquisition and updating of weapons ontology as a source of deriving high level weapons information. The present paper outlines the main ideas used to appro...

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...

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 “incongr...

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 coun...

A recent Facebook update informed a user's friends that, on a night out at a bar, “a white dude was hitting on me all night”. It occurred to a couple of us independently that the user was not white or at least very likely not to be white, which was actually confirmed by those in the know. This paper is an attempt to explore and explain, the nature...

What is it that makes humor difficult to understand and appreciate in a second language (L2)? Despite advances in research in both L2 pragmatics and humor studies, scholars have as yet had little to say on this topic. In interviews, learners themselves pinpoint culture, vocabulary, and the speed at which playful talk often takes place as difficulti...

The present work is a part of research study aiming to develop an algorithm and a software system capable of quick identification of weapons and relations between human and a weapon in a scene. Bridging the semantic gap between the low level knowledge extracted from an image and the high level semantics needed to negotiate the weapon domain ontolog...

Much of what we think we know about the performance of humor relies on our intuitions about prosody (e.g., “it's all about timing”); however, this has never been empirically tested. Thus, the central question addressed in this article is whether speakers mark punch lines in jokes prosodically and, if so, how. To answer this question, this article u...

This article presents the state of the art of semantic-pragmatic research on humor. The developments in the field are seen as fanning out from two central concepts: the linguistic version of the incongruity/resolution theory of humor (script opposition) and the methodological claim that such a theory was a theory of humor competence. The developmen...

The article presents statistical evidence for the claim that the distribution of humor in Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Douglas Adams's The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not random and differs significantly between both texts. Using the methodology of the General Theory of Verbal Humor, all the instances of humour in both texts...

Irony is commonly thought of as a trope, consisting of saying the opposite of what one means; the latter is then inferentially retrieved, i.e., an implicature. This definition is in error since there exist cases of irony that do not involve the violation of truth. Various theories of irony emphasize different aspects of the phenomenon, such as nega...

This article examines the use of irony/sarcasm against a corpus of spontaneous spoken data. Unlike previous studies on the subject, our analysis takes into account the entire ironical exchange. We focus particularly on responses to an initial ironical turn, taking into consideration the issue of multi-turn ironical exchanges and unacknowledged iron...

There are a number of problems with the articles in this issue. As I read the articles in this guest edited issue of Humor, I could not help being reminded of George Santayana's (1863–1952) point: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” One of the problems is certainly that most of the authors (with the exception of the gue...