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The variables of the evaluative functional relationship: The case of humorous discourse
Abstract
In this paper I focus on the evaluative content of humor, an aspect which –to date and to my knowledge– has been dealt with only in a peripheral manner by research both on humor and on evaluation. Linguistic evaluation is viewed herein as a dynamical subsystem of language (as discussed in Alba-Juez & Alba-Juez 2012), and it is argued that it should be studied and analyzed as an important element in any theory of humor performance. A corpus of 100 psychology jokes in English and Spanish found on jokes websites was used as data, whose evaluative content was examined taking into account the findings of previous research on stance and evaluative language (e.g. Hunston & Thompson 2000; Martin & White 2005; Englebretson 2007; Bednarek 2006, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a & b; Thompson & Alba-Juez 2014) and the evaluative function of irony (e.g. Partington 2007, 2011; Alba-Juez & Attardo 2014).
Evaluation is treated herein as a pragmatic and cognitive phenomenon which is a function of a number of variables that interact with one another. Thus, a methodology and procedure to analyze the stance taken by the jokester (and transmitted through the jokes) is proposed, by means of which the evaluative content of the jokes is scrutinized in order to assign the corresponding qualitative values to each one of these interacting variables. This methodology is applied not only to the analysis of jokes in isolation, but also to the comparison of the evaluative equations of different jokes, or of similar jokes in different languages (English and Spanish, in this particular case). Likewise, it is suggested that this procedure can prove valid for the analysis of the evaluative content of any other discourse type, although genres other than humor are beyond the scope of this paper.
Thus, this study has two main aims: On the one hand, it is proposed that evaluation be included in humor theories as one of its ‘knowledge resources’, and for this purpose Ruiz Gurillos’s Revised General Theory of Verbal Humor (2013) is taken as a point of departure. On the other hand, the six main variables or ‘knowledge resources’2 of evaluation (found as the result of previous research on the topic) are explained, discussed and exemplified within the specific genre of psychology jokes. Evaluation is viewed as a function of these resources, the relationship between them being therefore a functional relationship.
... Ouch! Yummy!), or certain prosodic features used to express strong emotion (e.g. the falling intonation on the adverb out, or a generalized high pitch in utterances such as Get the hell out of here!!). Also from a functional perspective, but at the same time incorporating findings from psychological appraisal theories and from linguistic pragmatics, Alba-Juez (forthcoming) proposes to analyze the different dimensions of emotion by using an equation which presents a modified version of the functional relationship applied in previous work for the analysis of evaluation ( Alba-Juez 2016). In particular, this author proposes to tackle the analysis of emotion processes in language by incorporating pragmatic knowledge about phenomena such as emotional implicatures (e-implicatures, SchwarzFriesel, 2010), as well as methodological treatment and classification of emotions from the component approach ( Ortony & Turner 1990), which is partially connected with the psychological concept of emotion systems ( Panksepp 1982). ...
... Таким образом emotion talk-это разговор об эмоциях, а emotional talk-это эмоциональный разговор. Кроме того, опираясь на функциональный подход, но в то же время используя результаты исследований в области психологических оценочных теорий и лингвистической прагматики, Альба-Хуэс (в печати) предлагает анализировать различные аспекты эмоций с помощью формулы, которая представляет собой модифицированную версию функциональных отношений, примененную в предыдущих работах для анализа оценки ( Alba-Juez 2016). В частности, автор предлагает анализировать эмоциональные процессы в языке, используя прагматические знания о таких явлениях, как эмоциональные импликатуры-e-impli-catures (Schwarz-Friesel 2010), а также методологию и классификацию эмоций с позиций компонентного подхода ( Ortony & Turner 1990), который связан с психологической концепцией эмоций ( Panksepp 1982). ...
... Thus, irony depends upon the context, which includes the speaker's or writer's stance toward the subject and intended goal of the statement. Verbal irony always includes an evaluative component (Attardo, 2001;Alba-Juez, 2017), and often has a rhetorical function (Attardo, 2001). In "DNA," the rhetorical stance is satiric, and the rhetorical mode ironic. ...
One of the more popular transhumanist ideas is the belief that technology will allow for the transfer of human personality into a machine or cyborg body. Additionally, some transhumanists believe that this transfer could happen with few to no problems, and that such a transfer would result in a definite improvement of the human species. The episode “DNA” from the humorous British science-fiction television series Red Dwarf presents a story that challenges this idea of the easy transfer of personality. The story of the android who gets his wish to become human allows the writers to invert the common belief in Western thought that being human is inherently better than being an imitation of a human, and that technologically upgrading human bodies will produce “better” humans. By inversion, the program presents the idea that clearer and more ethical thinking is needed regarding technological enhancement, and not the utopian visions of many transhumanists.
... This definition considers the different parameters and variables that point towards the presence of emotion in discourse, such as the linguistic level at which it is manifested (by means of, for instance, lexicon, morphemes, constructions or inferences), or the mode of the emotion (e.g., linguistic, paralinguistic or by means of emoticons in the case of computer-mediated discourse). For a more extensive description of these variables, see Alba-Juez (2016, 2018. ...
Authors such as Tyler Schnoebelen (on page 12 of his study Emotions are Relational: Positioning and the Use of Affective Linguistic Resources), suggest that in some languages (cf. Navajo), certain dependent clauses are frequently used independently to “mark emotional evaluation and background information”. Evans, in his work on insubordination and its uses, makes use of the term insubordination to refer to this phenomenon. Our study focuses on a particular insubordinate construction introduced by the sequence ni que in Spanish, as in the example [¡Una carta cada día!] Ni que yo fuese Umbral. (CORPES Corpus), used as an independent clause with a sociopragmatic meaning, which is different from that of its subordinate counterpart (cf. No escribiría una carta cada día ni que yo fuese Umbral). Our research questions ask about the potential for ni que to be used as a discourse marker fulfilling an expressive function when it introduces this type of construction, and the derived hypothesis is then oriented to test whether Schnoebelen’s observation about insubordinate constructions also applies to this Spanish construction. In order to test this hypothesis, we performed a functional discourse analysis of more than 2000 concordances (and their extended contexts) in Mark Davies’ Corpus del Español and the Real Academia CORPES XXI. Our findings show that the insubordinate construction differs in function and meaning from its subordinate counterpart, the former fulfilling an emotive function, often combined with other discourse–pragmatic functions, such as evaluation or the organization of discourse. View Full-Text
Keywords: insubordinate constructions; the expressive function of language; language and emotion; ni que construction in Spanish
... As I have already pointed out, the expression of emotion is a complex phenom- enon that involves the combination of both appraisal and emotion systems, whose analysis can be enriched by interdisciplinary research. In particular, in this study I propose to enlarge this previous research by analysing the different dimensions separately by using the functional relationship I applied in previous work on the analysis of evaluation (Alba- Juez 2016Juez , 2017, now enriched with the findings of psychological appraisal theories as well as those of linguistic pragmatics for the analysis of emotion in discourse. ...
This study discusses theoretical and methodological aspects of the relationship between appraisal and emotion processes in language/discourse. Taking as my point of departure both Appraisal Theory and Geoff Thompson's later review thereof, I argue that despite their invaluable illumination of appraisal and emotion processes, these approaches cannot elucidate the complex similarities and differences between appraisal and emotion. I sketch a more interdisciplinary approach that draws not only on functional linguistics but also on linguistic pragmatics and psychological appraisal theories. I then propose a modified version of the functional relationship applied for the analysis of linguistic evaluation in my previous work as a methodological tool for the treatment of emotion in language, clearing the ground for future large-scale qualitative projects on the topic.
... As I have already pointed out, the expression of emotion is a complex phenomenon that involves the combination of both appraisal and emotion systems, whose analysis can be enriched by interdisciplinary research. In particular, in this study I propose to enlarge this previous research by analysing the different dimensions separately by using the functional relationship I applied in previous work on the analysis of evaluation (Alba- Juez 2016Juez , 2017, now enriched with the findings of psychological appraisal theories as well as those of linguistic pragmatics for the analysis of emotion in discourse. ...
The study presented here discusses some theoretical and methodological aspects of the analysis of the relationship between appraisal and emotion processes in language/discourse. The analysis is supported by qualitative data taken from three different linguistic corpora and is mainly based on the functional linguistic perspective, taking as a point of departure both Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005)-considering that this is the most elaborate and best-known model of linguistic appraisal to date-and Thompson's later (2015b) review of the Appraisal model regarding the common ground shared by evaluation and emotion. The main argument I defend is that even though the above-mentioned approaches have shed invaluable light on appraisal and emotion processes in language, they turn out to be insufficient to elucidate their intricate and complex relationship, as well as their similarities and differences. Therefore I propose a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of the phenomenon by drawing not only on the findings of these functional approaches but also on those of linguistic pragmatics and psychological appraisal theories. In particular, I propose to tackle the analysis of emotion processes in language by incorporating pragmatic knowledge about phenomena such as emotional implicatures (Schwarz-Friesel 2010) as well as methodological treatment and classification of emotions from the component approach (Ortony & Turner 1990), which is connected to the psychological concept of emotion systems (Panksepp 1982). I finally present the results of this interdisciplinary analysis by applying a 374 modified version of the functional relationship I proposed for the analysis of linguistic evaluation in previous work (Alba-Juez 2016, 2017), which I argue can also be a good methodological tool for the analysis of emotion in language and may clear the ground for future large-scale qualitative projects on the topic.
Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chapters are organised in a systematic fashion, and span a wide range of theoretical research on how language communicates multiple meanings in context, how it influences our daily interactions and relationships with others, and how it helps construct our social worlds. Providing insight into a fascinating array of phenomena and novel research directions, the Handbook is not only relevant to experts of pragmatics but to any reader with an interest in language and its use in different contexts, including researchers in sociology, anthropology and communication, and students of applied linguistics and related areas, as well as professional practitioners in communication research.
Compliments and compliment responses (CRs) are face threatening acts which may jeopardize the interlocutor’s positive and negative face. Compliment responses are especially challenging because of the need to balance accepting the compliment with saving face for not sounding arrogant. The use of humor in responding to a compliment can serve as a mitigating factor to respond to a compliment gracefully but with amusement to balance out the loss of face. The present study seeks to analyze humorous CRs in Spanish and English in order to establish cross-cultural comparisons. The results suggest some distinct cultural tendencies. American English speakers prefer self-denigrating humor whereas Peninsular Spanish use teasing and ironic upgrades. Spanish speakers also rely on a wider variety of linguistic resources to add humor to their CRs. Both language groups use humor as a tool to save face. Teasing among Peninsular Spanish is used to strengthen familiarity and closeness ties between interlocutors, a trait often associated with the positive politeness nature of Spanish culture. Self-denigrating humor in English CRs is described as ambiguous from a politeness perspective because it can preserve negative face by directing the humor to the speaker or it may be interpreted as an imposition to reiterate the compliment.
La lingüística del humor en español
Leonor Ruiz Gurillo
Afrontarel análisis lingüístico del humor en español no es una tarea fácil. Suponetratar de manera seria textos humorísticos y, hasta cierto punto, desentrañarlos mecanismos que los sustentan. El libro Lalingüística del humor en español, desarrollado en el seno del grupo deinvestigación GRIALE de la Universidad de Alicante (www.griale.es), se acerca aeste campo poco explorado del español. Para hacerlo, delimita el objeto deestudio, aspecto de por sí complejo y controvertido, ya que el humor hapreocupado a lingüistas, sí, pero también a sociólogos, psicólogos, médicos,enfermeros o pedagogos, entre otros. Esta separación conduce a una radiografíadel humor desde las tres teorías más potentes para el análisis lingüístico deeste hecho pragmático: la Teoría General del Humor Verbal, la LingüísticaCognitiva y la Teoría de la Relevancia. La elección de la primera de ellas y surevisión conduce hacia un modelo integrado donde aspectos como el registro, eltexto o el género, así como las marcas e indicadores que se emplean en el humory la elección metapragmática que lleva a cabo de las mismas elhablante/escritor, toman un nuevo sentido. Con este modelo revisado se está encondiciones de analizar tanto géneros humorísticos como serios. El génerohumorístico por excelencia es el chiste, aunque también tienen cabida en eltrabajo otros como el monólogo humorístico o la parodia. La conversaciónespontánea, si bien es un género serio, emplea el humor como estrategiaconversacional. Algunos de los aspectos aquí tratados conducen a otro tema controvertido,la relación entre ironía y humor. En fin, la lingüística del humor abre, deeste modo, una vía para el transeúnte que se adentra en los terrenos defrontera del humor en español. Acotado a partir de la noción de texto, elchiste, el monólogo, el sketch o laconversación espontánea son formas de humor que se manifiestan en creaciones planificadas o espontáneas,como los chistes breves, el programa televisivo El Club de la Comedia, el sketchtelevisivo de Saturday Night Live olas conversaciones coloquiales recogidas por el grupo Val.Es.Co.
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 were mainly oriented toward the identification of ironical situations by English native speakers. For our analysis of the evaluative content of ironic utterances we draw on the findings of studies such as Thompson and Hunston (2000), Martin and White (2005), or Bednarek (2008a). The results of the survey show that the great majority of speakers recognized the different evaluative shades of the ironical situations presented, which gave grounds for accepting our hypothesis that the essence of verbal irony is not to be found in its possible implied criticism, but in a finer, more subtle aspect of the phenomenon which has to do with a clash or contradiction at different linguistic/ discursive levels.
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 325-335
In this paper we study the connection between the use of evaluative language and the building of both personal and social identities, from the perspective of
Dynamical System
Theory
. We primarily discuss two issues: 1) The use of evaluation (in the sense given to the term by Alba-Juez and Thompson (forthcoming)) as a means to the construction of both individual and group identities, thus exploring how the connection between linguistic choices and social identities is shaped by interactional needs for stancetaking. In order to illustrate this connection, we examine examples of the use of evaluative language in a web social network, and we analyze some of the discourse elements showing ways of positioning that act as catalysts for the emergence of a multifactorial dynamic system of identities. 2) The consideration of
Dynamical System Theory
(DST) as a theoretical framework for the modeling of language and identity. Although originally a mathematical theory, DST has been adopted by cognitive science as a valid framework for the study of cognitive phenomena, on the grounds that natural cognition is a dynamical phenomenon. Within the realm of (socio) linguistics and pragmatics, this study is to a certain degree in line with some recent studies such as Gibbs (2010), Geeraerts, Kristiansen and Peirsman (2010), or Moreno Fernández (2012). Thus, we herein focus on how linguistic evaluation intervenes in the intricate dynamical system of identity, and even though we do not engage in complex mathematical disquisition, we argue that the idea and philosophical foundation underlying DST can lead us towards the ‘integration’ of the complex equation of identity construction, and that consequently the field has great potential for further research.
This article explores evaluative discourse on social networking sites (henceforth SNSs), paying special attention to the important role played by the expression of attitude and positive politeness in the management of interpersonal rapport. The specific contextual features of SNSs seem to trigger the production of attitudinal meanings of affect, judgement and appreciation, which are exploited for the relational work involved in the construction and maintenance of positive face. The corpus for the study consists of a random sample of 100 messages with 248 evaluative utterances exchanged among university students in the United Kingdom and the United States on a particular site, i.e., Facebook, during the two-year period 2010-2012. Analysis of evaluative discourse is approached from the theories of appraisal (Martin and White 2005, Bednarek 2008) and politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). The methodology for processing the data borrows quantitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics (CL), involving the coding and statistical treatment of the sample with UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell 2011).
This paper is an examination of the as yet little-studied phenomenon of phrasal irony, defined as the reversal of customary collocational patterns of use of certain lexical items. The first research question is how phrasal irony is structured. A second, very closely related question is how, why and where writers use it, and a third question is how it relates to other more familiar types of irony.During the course of these investigations it was observed that, occasionally, the ironic use of a particular phrase or phrase template is found to be repeated frequently and productively and can therefore be said to have become a recognised usage in its own right. However, it was also noted that by no means all reversal of normal collocational patterning is performed with an ironic intent, and so yet a further research question is how the circumstances when phrasal irony is at play might differ from those of simple counter-instances to the statistically normal collocational patterns of use.Corpus methodology is used to locate ironic uses of phrase templates for examination. As Louw (1993) points out, before the advent of language corpora, detecting sufficient instances of such use, which can be quite rare, was problematic, and this may explain why so little previous attention has been given to these phenomena.
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This paper outlines a corpus-assisted investigation into the nature and functions of irony in both spoken interaction and written texts. We begin with a review of some of the principal current debates in irony studies, which have until recently often been conducted with little recourse to authentic examples of use in interactive discourse types. We go on to consider, from an examination of corpus-based real-life data, firstly, how explicit irony operates and then whether there might be a more objective way of identifying and defining episodes of implicit irony than simple reliance on the researcher's unsupported intuition. Potential sites of implicit irony are then examined in the data to see how and why speakers and writers employ it and how hearers and audiences respond. The data analyses afford strong evidence that the principal mechanism driving all irony is an implied reversal of the evaluative meaning of the utterance (rather than of the propositional/ideational meaning, as argued in many traditional theories of irony). In addition, they reveal how irony in discourse always has a strategic argumentative point.Three corpora were employed, the first of semi-spontaneous interactive spoken discourse (WHB: circa 6 million words of White House press briefings in transcription [1998–2004]), the second of spoken interviews (Ints: 250,000 words of transcribed televised UK political interviews) and the third of written texts (Papers: 100 million words of UK broadsheet texts). Techniques from Corpus Linguistics, principally concordancing, were employed. Most of the corpus interrogation was conducted using the WordSmith Tools suite of programs. Corpora have only rarely been used to investigate participants’ interaction in discourse and this paper is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS).
The dynamical hypothesis is the claim that cognitive agents are dynamical systems. It stands opposed to the dominant computational hypothesis, the claim that cognitive agents are digital computers. This target article articulates the dynamical hypothesis and defends it as an open empirical alternative to the computational hypothesis. Carrying out these objectives requires extensive clarification of the conceptual terrain, with particular focus on the relation of dynamical systems to computers. Key words cognition, systems, dynamical systems, computers, computational systems, computability, modeling, time. Long Abstract The heart of the dominant computational approach in cognitive science is the hypothesis that cognitive agents are digital computers; the heart of the alternative dynamical approach is the hypothesis that cognitive agents are dynamical systems. This target article attempts to articulate the dynamical hypothesis and to defend it as an empirical alternative to the compu...
This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.
In most holiday destinations, high summer naturally means high season, but around the capital cities of Europe the streets are often practically deserted. This makes July and August the perfect time to catch up on your culture so whilst the Parisians flock to Corsica or the Cote d’Azur, you can enjoy Paris without the traffic jams and experience the city’s many open spaces at their best. Barcelona is perfect for a summer break, and you can be both culture vulture and beach bum depending on your mood.
It is now an acknowledged fact in the world of linguistics that the concept of evaluation is crucial, and that there is very little – if any – discourse that cannot be analyzed through the prism of its evaluative content. This book presents some of the latest developments in the study of this phenomenon. Released more than a decade later than Hunston and Thompson’s (2000) Evaluation in Text, Evaluation in Context is designed as its sequel, in an attempt to continue, update and extend the different avenues of research opened by the earlier work. Both theoretical and empirical studies on the topic are presented, with the intention of scrutinizing as many of its dimensions as possible, by not only looking at evaluative texts, but also considering the aspects of the discursive context that affect the final evaluative meaning at both the production and reception stages of the evaluative act. The editors’ main objective has been to gather contributions which investigate the manifold faces and phases of evaluation by presenting a wide variety of perspectives that include different linguistic theories (e.g. Axiological Semantics, Functionalism or Politeness Theory), different levels of linguistic description (e.g. phonological, lexical or semantic), and different text types and contexts (e.g. the evaluation found in ironic discourse, the multimodality of media discourse or the world of politics, just to name a few). The volume can be of use not only for scholars who study the evaluative function of language, but also for students who wish to pursue research in the area.
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. © 2001 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
This book offers new insights into how English speakers talk about their own and others' emotions. Using statistical evidence and corpus-linguistic methods, but also qualitative text analyses, the author examines how expressions that describe emotions are employed in a large corpus of conversational, newspaper, fictional and academic English. © Monika Bednarek 2008. Foreword, J.R. Martin 2008. All rights reserved.
This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.
Irony and Humor: From pragmatics to discourse is a complete updated panorama of linguistic research on irony and humor, based on a variety of perspectives, corpora and theories. The book collects the most recent contributions from such diverse approaches as Relevance Theory, Cognitive Linguistics, General Theory of Verbal Humor, Neo-Gricean Pragmatics or Argumentation. The volume is organized in three parts referring to pragmatic, perspectives, mediated, discourse, and conversational interaction. This book will be higly relevant for anyone interested in pragmatics, discourse analysis as well as social sciences.
The notion of Functional Linguistics is associated in many linguists’ minds with a dichotomy between formal and functional approaches. In recent years the old antagonism has yielded to a more peaceful co-existence, with functional linguistics being generally recognized as having validity in its own right. What characterizes functionalism is the conviction that the primordial function of languages in society is to permit sophisticated communication of ideas and feelings between human beings; this function impacts on both the current use of languages and how they have developed historically, as a result of which many language phenomena, certainly from the area of morphosyntax, are interpreted as being explainable, with the explanations being sought primarily outside of language proper.
The Theses of the Prague School may be taken as the starting point for the roughly equal weight given to structure and function in many contemporary theories. However, the permanence of structure has been denied by the emergentist vein within functionalism, while ‘formal functionalists’ have treated functional considerations as an add-on to an account of structure. Functionalists tend to see structure as governed by interacting and potentially violable principles rather than hard and fast rules; some in the ‘usage-based’ approach have come close to coalescing with cognitive linguistics.
Functionalism is inherently open to interdisciplinarity: there are rich connections and overlaps with pragmatics/discourse analysis, language typology and psycholinguistics. Functionalism seems unlikely to merge with purely formal approaches, but there are signs of a nascent division of labour, with functional linguistics emphasizing the communicative motivation of multiple aspects of linguistic structure while recognizing the existence and communicative advantages of conventionalized aspects of that structure.
Many researchers claim joking and laughter to be an adjacency pair. There are, however, a range of strategies used for supporting humor in conversation, of which laughter is just one. This paper uses natural conversational data to illustrate a variety of humor support strategies. Common support strategies include contributing more humor, playing along with the gag, using echo or overlap, offering sympathy and contradicting self-deprecating humor.
There are four implicatures associated with full support of humor:
The article proposes a general theory of verbal humor, focusing on verbal jokes as its most representative subset. The theory is an extension and revision of Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor and of Attardo's five-level joke representation model. After distinguishing the parameters of the various degrees of similarity among the joke examples, six knowledge resources informing the joke, namely script oppositions, logical mechanisms, situations, targets, narrative strategies, and language, are put forward. A hierarchical organization for the six knowledge resources is then discovered on the basis of the asymmetrical binary relations, of the proposed and modified content / tool dichotomy, and, especially, of the hypothesized perceptions of the relative degrees of similarity. It is also argued that the emerging joke representation model is neutral to the process of joke production. The proposed hierarchy enables the concepts of joke variants and invariants, introduced previously by Attardo, to be firmed up, generalized, and augmented into a full-fledged taxonomy indexed with regard to the shared knowledge resource values (for example, two jokes may be variants on, that is, sharing, the same script oppositions and logical mechanisms). The resulting general theory of verbal humor is discussed in the light of its relations with various academic disciplines and areas of research as well as with the script-based semantic theory of humor, special theories of humor, and incongruity-based theories.
A fundamental definitional problem is examined for humor and irony: in neither case can the subclasses of these phenomena be kept distinct. This indeterminacy is reduced to the indeterminacy of indirect speech and implicature, on which irony entirely and humor, at least largely, rely. The "performance" of humor and irony is investigated by examining the motivations for Ss to use irony and the responses that Hs produce to it, which range from mode adoption to ignoring it (deliberately or not).
Evaluation — the function and usage of language to express the speaker’s or writer’s opinion — has only relatively recently become the object of systematic linguistic research, for example in stance or appraisal analysis. This paper proposes an alternative, corpus-based approach to evaluation which assumes that there are at least ten different meaning dimensions (parameters) along which speakers can evaluate aspects of the world. This framework helps to explain the complexity of evaluation, and in particular what is here called
evaluative interplay
or
combination
: the expression of more than two evaluative parameters at the same time, which can be realized by
evaluative conflation
(evaluations signalled by one and the same linguistic item) and
evaluative collocation
(evaluations signalled by different linguistic items). Both the parameter-based framework and evaluative interplay are illustrated with a number of examples from authentic discourse (mostly from British newspapers).
In the past two decades or so, a number of researchers from various fields within linguistics have turned their attention to interpersonal phenomena, such as the linguistic expression of speaker opinion or
evaluation
(also called
stance
or
appraisal
), or the encoding of subjectivity in language and its diachronic development (
subjectification/subjectivization
). Many linguists have offered categorizations of evaluative meaning, based on authentic discourse data, but no connection has been made with cognitive approaches to appraisal processes. This paper offers a first meta-theoretical exploration of such issues. It compares dimensions of evaluation that have been identified in linguistic and cognitive studies, and also examines how psychological research into basic emotions can be related to linguistic research on affect. On the basis of these comparisons a proposal for a new classification of evaluative meanings is made. The focus of this paper is on only one aspect of the highly complex phenomenon of evaluation, namely potential evaluative dimensions, although other relevant issues will also be touched upon, including the pragmatics of evaluation (evaluation and context).
The goal of this paper is to propose a model that distinguishes between irony and humor in the context of literary texts. The comparative model was constructed based on existing models, and elaborated on them, substantiating the model through textual analysis focusing on cues for irony (Clark and Gerrig 1984; Grice 1975, 1978; Haverkate 1990; Sperber and Wilson 1981; Wilson and Sperber 1992;) and cues for humor (Alexander 1997; Jeffers 1995; Oring 1989; Raskin and Attardo 1994). The research was based on four conceptual paradigms: pragmatic studies of irony, pragmatic studies of humor, a pragmatic approach to the study of literary texts, and theories of text interpretation. The textual analysis was based on an existing model for the interpretation of indirect speaker's meanings (Dascal and Weizman 1987; Weizman and Dascal 1991; 2005), and on the concepts “cues and “clues as employed in that model.
This article presents a theory of irony which claims that an ironical utterance is both inappropriate and relevant to its context. Extensive discussion of previous theories of irony is presented to justify the various aspects of the theory and in particular its two-stage processing approach and the vexing issue of the motivation for the speakers' use of irony.
Evaluation in Text Types. Special Issue of Functions of Language 15
- Monika Bednarek
Bednarek, Monika (ed). 2008a. Evaluation in Text Types. Special Issue of Functions of Language
15.1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Robert Englebretson
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