Abstract
This article is meant to give a state-of-the-art picture of cognitive linguistic studies on humour. Cognitive linguistics has had an immense impact on the development of humour research and, ...importantly, humour theory over the past few decades. On the one hand, linguists, philosophers and psychologists working in the field of humour research have put forward proposals to explain the cognitive processes underlying specifically humour production and reception (e.g. the incongruity-resolution framework and its refinements). On the other hand, humour research has drawn on theories and concepts advanced in contemporary cognitive linguistics taken as a whole (e.g. mental spaces, conceptual blending, salience or conceptual metaphor). The different notions and approaches originating in these strands of research are in various ways interwoven in order to give new insights into the cognitive workings of humour.
This chapter discusses the function of blogs as tools enhancing citizen participation in political communication. Adopting the perspective of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, a set of ...blogs from the US presidential election campaign are analysed in order to determine the frequency of reference to the candidates, the parties, as well as the bloggers themselves. The analysis of pronoun choice, verbs and modality indicate that blogs enhance participation rhetoric. The data further indicate that citizen bloggers attach more importance to individual political figures than party bloggers do. The tendency to refer to the candidates rather than to their political affiliation may be explained as evidence that people not belonging to parties interpret politics as a struggle between different politicians and not between different ideologies. Since the language representation of the political scene in citizens' blogs shows distinct traces of the ongoing process of personalization of politics, the political blog can be considered as a "tool of citizen empowerment".
This introductory article gives a state-of-the-art picture of the research on conversational humour in cultural contexts. The most important categories of conversational humour are briefly ...introduced, followed by an overview of the existing research on conversational humour within and across languages and cultures. The focus is both on topical strands and on the prevalent methodological approaches. The paper closes with a summary of the contributions to this Special Issue.
The Irony of Irony: Irony Based on Truthfulness Dynel, Marta
Corpus pragmatics : international journal of corpus linguistics and pragmatics,
03/2017, Letnik:
1, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
Drawing on a corpus of academic examples, this paper addresses the vexing notion of “verisimilar irony” from a philosophical-pragmatic perspective. This species of irony escapes a neo-Gricean ...definition of prototypical irony based on the assumption that the speaker utters what he/she believes to be false (cf. untruthfulness) in order to convey an implicit message which is to be gleaned on the basis of meaning opposition. Verisimilar irony, as defined here, relies on the speaker’s expression of his/her evaluative belief at the level of Grice’s what is said or implicated (if another figure is involved). A proposal is put forward that verisimilar irony does rest on untruthfulness, manifesting itself in as if implicature (untruthful implicature serving as an intermediate interpretative step) caused by flouting the Relation maxim. This as if implicature, in turn, necessitates meaning reversal so that the ultimate evaluative implicature can be inferred. In the course of the paper, the previous examples of verisimilar irony found in the scholarship (constituting the present corpus) are critically revisited to indicate that the spectrum of forms the focal type of irony can take is narrower than other authors have suggested. It is shown that some of the examples claimed to represent what is here called “verisimilar irony” either are not irony at all or represent other categories of the focal figure.
Goffman’s work on participation marks a watershed in linguistic studies on speaker and hearer roles in interaction, both in everyday conversations and in media discourse. Goffman is thus widely ...credited for having expanded the dyadic (speaker – hearer) model of communication. Albeit not elaborated in detail, his classification of speaker roles, as well as listeners, the latter divided into ratified hearers (addressed and unaddressed recipients) and unratified hearers (bystanders, overhearers and eavesdroppers), is the departure point for various classifications of participants propounded by contemporary researchers. This article proposes an exegesis of Goffman’s work on participation, typified by talk, a strand which reverberates in his essays devoted to distinct topics, with special attention paid to non‐speaking participant statuses. Only a bird’s‐eye‐view approach to Goffman’s writings guarantees a full picture of his conceptualisation of multi‐party verbal encounters.
This paper differentiates between several types of verbal deception and related notions: lying, bald-faced lies, bullshit, and deception without lying, inclusive of half-truths/lies of omission and ...withholding information. This is done in the light of the Gricean work on speaker meaning materialised by what is said and implicature, both being dependent on maxims, which can be observed or nonfulfilled (flouted or violated). To meet this objective, both Grice's and neo-Gricean postulates on truthfulness, lying and deception are revisited. Defining distinct types of deception with Grice's concepts, the paper teases out the complex interdependence between the two levels of speaker meaning: (un)truthful implicature and (un)truthful what is said. Adapted from the source document
This paper explores the workings of deception performed in multi-party interactions, a topic hitherto hardly ever examined by deception philosophers. Deception is here discussed in the light of a ...neo-Goffmanian classification of (un)ratified hearers and a neo-Gricean version of speaker meaning, anchored in non-reflexive intentionality and accountability, which is shown to operate beyond the speaker-hearer dyad. An utterance, it is argued, may carry different meanings, judged according to their (lack of) intentionality and (non)deceptiveness, towards the individuals performing different hearer roles. The complex mechanisms of deception with regard to different hearers are illustrated with examples culled from the American television series "House." Deception in fictional interactions is illustrative of real-life manifestations of deception, yet it brings into focus also those rare ones, which are in the centre of philosophical attention.
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