时间：9:50-11:40 a.m., June 2, 2010 (Wednesday)

地点：Room 412, Building 6B

 

In this paper, I will address the issue of whether non-humorous texts that present resolved incongruities (e.g., mystery novels) are a counter-example to the incongruity-resolution theory of humor.

The claim of the presence of multiple incongruities in jokes (and therefore a fortiori in more complex texts) is nothing new (e.g., Rothbart and Pien 1977: 37-38). However, Hempelmann and Attardo (forth.) identify three types of roles for incongruities in a humorous text: highly salient focal incongruities, i.e., incongruities that are partially resolved by the logical mechanism of the joke (Ziv’s “local logic”, Aubouin’s “justification”), background incongruities, which are still essential to the joke, but are less salient, and finally completely backgrounded incongruities, which can be removed from the joke text without effect on the humor thereof. Completely backgrounded incongruities are not only not salient, but cannot be brought to the foreground.

In this paper, I will exemplify and describe the above concepts and present an analysis of different types of incongruities in humorous and non-humorous texts, I will then develop the hypothesis that one of the characteristics of humorous texts is that the focal and backgrounded incongruities cannot be fully resolved, whereas non-humorous texts can and do resolve these kinds of incongruities (cf. Oring 2003 for a similar claim about riddles). Conversely, completely backgrounded incongruities are perceived as flaws in non-humorous texts, as they interfere with the assumption of “naturalism” common to most narrative.

The significance of these findings lies in the refutation of the claim that incongruity- resolutions theories of humor cannot differentiate between humorous texts and non-humorous texts with (resolved) incongruities, such as detective stories. Examples from Wilde and Chesterton will be used.

 

Salvatore Attardo is the Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. He has written two books on humor

 

·         Linguistic Theories of Humor, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.

·         Humorous Texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. 2001.

 

He has co-authored a textbook, with Steve Brown, (Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2000. second edition 2005.

 

He co-edited a collection of essays: New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor. Editura Academica. Galati, Rumenia. (With Diana Popa). 2007 and edited a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics. The Pragmatics of Humor, 35:9. 2003.