Meaning and humour

List of figures xi

List of tables xii

List of illustrations xiv

Acknowledgements xv

Typographical conventions xvii

1. Introduction 1
1.1. About this book 1
1.2. Semantic typography 6
1.3. Jakobson’s model of communication and the
metalingual function 10
1.4. An introductory framework: form, meaning, world 11
1.5. Defining the word and other lexical concepts 16
1.6. Humour, ambiguity and incongruity 21
1.7. Summary 23

2. Meaning in the language system: aspects of form
and meaning 25
2.1. Levels in the language system 25
2.2. Phonology/graphology 27
2.3. Morphology: affixation 29
2.4. Re-analysis and folk-etymology 33
2.5. Compounds, collocations and idioms 37
2.6. Summary 49

3. Semantics and conceptual meaning of grammar 51
3.1. The meaning of modification 51
3.2. Epithets and classifiers 54
3.3. The of-genitive 56
3.4. The scope and orientation of modification 58
3.5. A semantic approach to syntax: Halliday and
transitivity 59
3.6. An example of analysis 62
3.7. Transformations: passivisation and nominalisation 67
3.8. Ergative meanings 69
3.9. Reciprocal verbs 70
3.10. Summary 71

4. Semantics and the conceptual meaning of lexis 73
4.1. Sense relations 74
4.2. Lexical ambiguity 77
4.3. Presupposition 83
4.4. Meaning oppositions 87
4.5. Hyponymy 95
4.6. Meronymy and synecdoche 98
4.7. Componential analysis 99
4.8. Sense relations in the dictionary and in a text 102
4.9. Vague and fuzzy concepts 103
4.10. Summary and afterthought 108

5. Personal, social and affective meanings 110
5.1. Reflected meaning 110
5.2. Connotative meanings 111
5.3. Affective meaning 113
5.4. Social meaning 120
5.5. Grammar and interpersonal meanings 127
5.6. Humour and social or interpersonal meanings 130
5.7. Summary 133

6. Textual meaning and genre 135
6.1. Collocative meaning 135
6.2. Thematic meaning and information focus 137
6.3. Cohesion 141
6.4. Genre 143
6.5. A critique of traditional de-contextualised semantics,
and meaning change 160
6.6. Summary 164

7. Metaphor and figures of speech 166
7.1. Terminology for metaphor analysis 167
7.2. Original and conventional metaphors 171
7.3. Conceptual metaphor theory 172
7.4. Cognitive metaphors exploited in humour 174
7.5. Metaphors and their co-text 180
7.6. What metaphors and humour have in common 185
7.7. Degrees of conventionality: semantics or pragmatics 190
7.8. Summary 192

8. Pragmatics: reference and speech acts 194
8.1. The boundaries of semantics and pragmatics 195
8.2. Symbol, icon and index 196
8.3. Reference 199
8.4. Deixis 203
8.5. Speech acts 205
8.6. Conversational analysis 216
8.7. Problems with speech act theory and
conversational analysis 221
8.8. Summary 222

9. Pragmatics: co-operation and politeness 224
9.1. Grice’s co-operative principle 225
9.2. Observing the maxims: standard implicature 225
9.3. Breaking the maxims 226
9.4. Ways of breaking the maxims 228
9.5. The co-operative principle and humour theory 233
9.6. Interpersonal pragmatics: politeness and the
politeness principle 236
9.7. Modesty, approbation and banter 242
9.8. Impoliteness, humour and failed humour 244
9.9. Summary 245

10. Relevance Theory, schemas and deductive inference 247
10.1. Propositions, propositional attitude and implicature 247
10.2. What is relevance? Contextual effects and
processing effort 251
10.3. Relevance, deductive logic and understanding jokes 255
10.4. The relation of Relevance Theory to Grice’s theory 257
10.5. Implicature and schema theory 258
10.6. Echoic utterances and irony 265
10.7. Echoic utterances, levels of discourse and multiple
voices in texts 268
10.8. Echoes and allusions 270
10.9. Jokes: echoic mentions or uses? 271
10.10. Summary 273

11. Lexical priming: information, collocation, predictability
and humour 276
11.1. Predictability and information theory 276
11.2. Collocation and predictability 279
11.3. Collocation and text-linguistics 283
11.4. Lexical priming and collocation 285
11.5. Ambiguity, humour and the overriding of priming 289
11.6. Some reservations about priming theory as a
theory of humour 306
11.7. Theories of humour and the meaning constraints
of language 308
11.8. An afterthought and hint of a theory 312
11.9. Summary 315

Glossary 317

Notes 337

References 341

Index 350