Factors Influencing Interpretation of Humorous Ambiguities
What makes something humorous? Often, humor is found through peculiarities of language. One such peculiarity is the different definitions that are related to the same word. When the correct choice of these definitions is unclear it results in an ambiguity.
In the 1970's David Swinney did a study involving cross-modal priming. This research supported the idea that all meanings of ambiguous words are activated regardless of the context. To decide which interpretation is the correct one we generally use five factors; frequency, prosody, context, syntax, and plausibility.
Frequency is the rate of occurrence of a particular meaning of a word or phrase in everyday language. Generally, when we see an ambiguous word we immediately consider its most frequent definition. Prosody, the rhythm and intonation of a word or phrase refers to verbal language, and therefore will not be considered further in our analysis.
Context is the words around the ambiguous phrase that provide clues to meaning. Syntax refers the way the words are put together structurally, and also gives clues to the meaning of ambiguous words. Plausibility refers to the realistic possibility of the word or phrase, in other words the logic of the phrase.
We use these factors in different degrees depending on the word or phrase we are trying to understand. In some cases these factors do not lead to the same conclusion for everyone, frequency, for example, may be different depending on experience. Generally however, plausibility provides a clear support for one interpretation of an ambiguity over another. To understand further these factors, let us take a look at several examples of actual newspaper h...
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...hat a defendant in a trial would be shot by the courts. Therefore, we are able to discern that the second interpretation is the correct one.
As we have seen in these examples the different factors interact in many different ways to help us understand ambiguity. Often the deciding factor lies not in facets of language itself, but in our knowledge and experience, the plausibility factor. However, our first impressions may be based on other factors indicating an implausible conclusion, this may be found humorous. In this way humor stems from ambiguities in language.
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Altmann, Gerry,T.M. The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of
Language, Mind, and Understanding. Oxford; Oxford University Press. 1997.
364) - This leads to the confusion of a statement's meaning. Due to a phrase being unclear, it can be interpreted with many different meanings.
Humor is a tremendous factor in our daily lives. In the numerous ways we communicate with other people, one of the vital ways is through humor because it helps people get through the hard times, and makes the good times even better. Most of the things people find to be “funny” are based on experiences that have happened to them, others, where they live, and the events happening at the time. When looking at each era, and the humor used in that time, you can see that based on the things happening in that time their sense of humor was different. Humor has existed throughout all of humanity, considering the fact that chimps laugh, just goes to show how long humor has been around. As a result of this, we must look at the philosophy of humor, and
Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists study humor because it is a fundamental culture value, but they still can’t determine why certain things make some people laugh and others not. There are “humor quotient” tests that are designed to measure an individual’s sense of humor, but these tests are questionable. These tests aren’t accurate because almost all humor depends on cultural background knowledge and language skills. Not every person in the whole world, or even in one country share the same background knowledge and skills, therefore they cannot have the same type of humor. “The fact remains that individuals vary in their appreciation of humor” (Rappoport 9). Since humor varies from individual to individual, humor lies in the individual. How successful or funny a joke is depends on how the person receives the joke, humor cannot be measured by a statistical
Several cognitive theorists in the 1970s were of the view that the incongruity must be resolved, so that, it may be perceived as funny. Such a view of humor was known as “incongruity-resolution theories” which theorized that in order to “get a joke”, the incongruity in joke must be resolved. Suls (1972) proposed a ‘two-stage model’ according to which the ability to comprehend humor is crucially dependent upon the ability to resolve the incongruity between the punch line and the expectations shaped by the storyline. According to the theory, humor is divided into two different states: surprise and coherence. Surprise is a feeling generated by an unexpected situation. To comprehend a joke, however, one must go beyond the state of surprise and formulate a new, coherent interpretation of the information. This theory views humor as a problem solving task. The incongruity in the situation is resolved by transforming it into a congruous one. Shultz (1976) also proposed a theory that humour is created by a multistage process in which an initial incongruity is created, and then some further information causes that incongruity to be
Another aspect of lexical meaning is expressive meaning. Baker (1992) defines expressive meaning as a word that cannot be evaluated as true or false because the word in question has to do with the speaker's feeling and experience (p.13). For example, the word dog in English has a good connotation because dogs in the English-speaking context are considered humans' loyal friends. In contrast, in Thai, the word dog is considered derogatory because they always fight among themselves and scavenge for food. . (Nitaya ,2009)
The manner in which things are said has its own undeniable impact on meaning and must be accounted for during translation. The question which presents itself is whether a given instance of linguistic markedness is evaluative (i.e. contextually motivated and functional) or is it merely a systemic matter opted for almost by default, and therefore unworthy of the text receiver’s attention?
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound. In any given language words are formed by combining these phonemes. English has approximately 40 different phonemes that are defined in terms of what is perceived, rather than in terms of acoustic patterns. Phonemes are abstract, subjective entities that are often specified in terms of how they are produced. Alone they have no meaning, but in combination they form words (Moore, 1997).
This paper will explain the process we, as humans usually follow to understand a certain text or utterance. This explanation would be achieved through the analysis of two journal articles from semantics and pragmatics perspective, taking into account a range of techniques associated with each of the two concepts including:
The real purpose of someone’s utterance sometimes will be interpreted differently by the hearer. That is why there will be several effects of just one utterance. For example, an utterance “it’s cold outside” (Yule, 1996: 55) can be interpreted
Sentence meanings are based on several things, including the syntactic structure of the sentence being stated, as well as, the morphemes and words. This linguistic unit that comprises of more than one sentence is known as discourse. The main component of pragmatics is speech acts. We use language to do an astonishing wide range of activities. We use it to convey information, request information, give orders, make requests, make threats, give warnings, make bets, give advice, and many more ideas. We have established in, with a set of standards guiding our language use that protects its integrity by requiring us, to be honest in its use, to have evidence for what we say, and to make what we say relevant. The first Maxim of Quality: Truth says do not say what you believe to be false or for which you lack adequate evidence. Without following this maxim language would be useless to us. The second is Maxim of Quantity: Information saying make your contributions as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange, not more information than required. You want to give enough information to be relevant but not so much that it makes for an unnecessarily long and confusing sentence. The third Maxim of Relation: Relevance simply says to be relevant. With this meaning to avoid random topic shifts to keep the conversation flowing in an orderly manner. Finally the last is Maxim of
Humor is the tendency to look at things from the mirthful or incongruous side. It is the quality that makes something laughable or amusing. Humor is the ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing or comical. It is the source of laughter and the catalyst of smiles. Humor is the spark that lights our eyes as well as the cause of tears that never grows old. Humor is a state of mind.
It is common knowledge that a joke imported from one language to another loses something in the translation, and, like all common knowledge, this is true up to a point. If the translator attempts to import the joke word-by-word into the new language, something will indeed be lost and the joke will almost certainly fail. That literal translation does not work for comedy, however, should not be viewed as a problem for translation but merely a problem for the literal-minded, for comedy is not the realm of the literal. Characters who adhere too closely to the literal rules of words and customs tend to find themselves in dire straits, and translators of comedy should take their cue from this...
The resolving ambiguity approach uses the following common rules to check if a sentence contains an ambiguity:
For as long as modern languages have been around, they’ve mostly been views as fairly static. This simply means that when you would read or hear a word or phrase, you just comprehend it and move on. It wasn’t until the last few decades that researches had looked beyond that “amodal” approach and began to view linguistic comprehension and perception differently.
Al-Sulaimaan (2011: 34), states that “Pragmatics studies language in use. It concentrates on those aspects of meaning that cannot be predicted by linguistic knowledge alone, and takes into account our knowledge about the physical and social