Non-literalness and non-bona-fîde in language

Abstract

An approach to formal and computational treatments of humor VICTOR RASKIN AND SALVATORE ATTARDOThe paper is devoted to the study of humor as an important pragmatic phenomenon bearing on cognition, and, more specifically, as a cooperative mode of non-bona-fide communication. Several computational models of humor are presented in increasing order of complexity and shown to reveal important cognitive structures in jokes. On the basis of these limited implementations, the concept of a full-fledged computational model for the understanding and generation of humor is introduced and discussed in various aspects. The model draws upon the authors ' General Theory of Verbal Humor, with its six knowledge resources informing a joke, and on SMEARR, a sophisticated semanticnetwork-based computational lexical environment. The relevance of the approach to the interpretation, generation, and cognitive structure of humor is discussed in the broader context of the nature of the cooperative non-bona-fide modes of communication. 32 VICTOR RASKIN AND SALVATORE ATTARDOAn unsophisticated, pre-theoretical list of non-literal phenomena would include: metaphor, simile, metonymy, idiom, indirect speech acts, implicature, exaggeration, understatement, humor, irony, and sarcasm. In general, non-literal meaning is non-compositional in that it is not derived wholly from the sum of the meanings of its parts or from the activated (syntactic) relations. This loose definition of non-literalness encompasses, therefore, a wide range of phenomena which stand in various relations to Grice's category of bonafide communication. Grice's (1975Grice's ( , 1989; see also Levinson 1983) cooperative principle, based on the four maxims (quantity, quality, relation, and manner), attempts to define the essential fact-conveying, "no-nonsense" mode as a mode in which the speaker and hearer are mutually committed to the truth of what is said and to the most straightforward and efficient methods for conveying that truth. Literal language, that is, using sentences only in their literal meanings, can indeed be viewed as the main venue for such bona-fide communication. Such a view will, however, be complicated by a number of factors.First, Grice himself muddied the waters by denying the existence of literal meaning (1957), true to his ordinary-language-philosophy party line, and by having only a passing interest in bona-fide communication on the way to implicature, the focus of his research. While bona-fide communication is delimited by the mandatory non-violation of any maxim, it also uncomfortably accommodates the deliberate flouting or exploitation of a maxim explicitly or implicitly signaled to the hearer and resulting in implicatures. When flouting a maxim, the speaker/hearer dyad can "recoup" the violation by honoring another maxim. Thus, for instance, when referring to a human being as "the cream in my coffee" (Grice 1989: 34)

The Laughing EFL Classroom: Potential Benefits and Barriers

“…In the context of Japanese students this could refer to humor about family relationships specific to Japan for example (cultural humor which students can relate to and find humorous) orwatching a Charlie Chaplin movie, in which gesticulations and body language can be viewed as humorous by a large number of cultures (universal humor). Other examples of humor types are actual versus non-actual (things that are real or not in the world and seen as humorous for that reason), normal versus abnormal (when something is strange for example and viewed as humorous), or possible versus impossible (when an impossible scenario is viewed as humorous perhaps) (Raskin and Attardo 1994).…”

Use and Non-use of Humor in Academic ESL Classrooms

“…The first linguistics-based theory of humor is Raskin's (1979Raskin's ( , 1985 semantic-script theory of humor (SSTH), which was subsequently revised and revisited as the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) by Attardo and Raskin (1991) and Raskin and Attardo (1994). GTVH employs semantic scripts (also called frames or schemas) to model the recipient's use of linguistic and real-world knowledge to interpret joke [or humorous] texts.…”

Between irony and humor

“…The cues for irony include the flouting of Gricean maxims (Grice 1975(Grice , 1978, the violation of the sincerity condition underlying the felicitous performance of a speech act (Haverkate 1990), and the detection of echoic mention (Sperber and Wilson 1981;Wilson and Sperber 1992) or of a pretense to be an injudicious person speaking to an uninitiated audience (Clark and Gerrig 1984). Cues for humor include script opposition and the violation of expectations (Raskin and Attardo 1994), punch lines (Oring 1989), word play (Alexander 1997) and non-sense (Jeffers 1995;Ziv 1984).…”