Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis

by Salvatore Attardo

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.

Genres: Humor

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Salvatore Attardo holds a PhD in English/Linguistics from Purdue University. He is the Head of the department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas A&M – Commerce. He has authored two monographs (Linguistic Theories of Humor, 1994, and Humorous Texts, 2001, both published by Mouton De Gruyter) and a sociolinguistics textbook, co-authored with Steven Brown (Understanding Language Structure, Interaction and Variation, University of Michigan Press 2000, 2nd ed, 2005), as well as numerous articles on semantics, pragmatics, and humor research. He is the Editor-in-Chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research.