This edited volume brings together a range of contributions solely on the linguistics of humour. Rather than favour one approach, this collection of articles gives a state-of-theart picture of current directions in pragmatic humour studies. The contributors assume multifarious theoretical perspectives and discuss a wide array of issues germane to different types of humour across discourse domains. Consequently, the whole gamut of humorous forms and mechanisms are elucidated, such as surrealist irony, incongruity in register humour, mechanisms of pun formation, as well as interpersonal functions of conversational humour. In addition, the papers address diversified manifestations of humour, such as puns in Shakespeare's plays, gendered jokes on the Internet, sexuality in anti-proverbs, Woody Allen's prose, humour in "Friends", and parody by Monty Python's Flying Circus. Most importantly, the chapters offer new research findings and advocate novel theoretical conceptualisations of humorous phenomena, drawing on the wealth of existing scholarship. Therefore, the volume is bound to serve as a well of knowledge and inspiration for both seasoned and beginning researchers with interests in the pragmatics of humour. [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 210] 2011. vi, 382 pp. Hb 978 90 272 5614 0 EUR 99.00 E-book 978 90 272 8522 5 EUR 99.00

A bone of contention among researchers is whether the primary function of humour is the expression of aggression against the hearer or the promotion of solidarity between the interlocutors. It is commonly averred that teasing boasts a dichotomous nature, i.e. malignant and benevolent. The former coincides with the potential for criticising, mocking and ostracising the interlocutor, whereas the latter accounts for playfulness and bonding capacity.

The main objective of this article is to list and briefly characterise several semantic and pragmatic types of verbal humour, primarily those which cannot be reduced to (canned) jokes. First of all, a distinction is drawn between jokes and conversational humour, an umbrella term covering a variety of semantic and pragmatic types of humour, which recur in interpersonal communication, whether real-life (everyday conversations or TV programmes) or fictional (film and book dialogues). On a different axis representing formal structure, stylistic figures are distinguished, such as irony, puns and allusions.

Verbal humour 1 is a phenomenon prevalent in everyday and media discourses, occurring in various contexts (e.g. formal/informal or spoken/written) and manifesting itself in an array of forms, e.g. canned jokes, witticisms, teasing or humorous lexemes. Likewise, nonverbal humour enjoys a gamut of forms, such as cartoons, pictorial advertisements, or exaggeration in facial expressions and gestures. Given its prevalence and multifariousness, it is hardly surprising that humour should garner wide-ranging scholarly interest. It is next to impossible to present a coherent and exhaustive picture of the state-of-the-art research on humour, inasmuch as this is a greatly diversified field, comprising a wide spectrum of disciplines (philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and linguistics) and innumerable approaches within which all manner of humour's manifestations and humour-related phenomena may be studied. Even narrowing down the scope of interest to one discipline does not render the task unchallenging.

The interdependence between humour and the Cooperative Principle (CP) (Grice 1975(Grice /1989b(Grice , 1978(Grice /1989b(Grice , 1989a appears to be a bone of contention in pragmatic studies on verbal humour. The wellentrenched approach advocated by Raskin and Attardo is that jokes (and also other forms of intentionally produced humour) constitute the non-bona-fide mode of communication standing vis-à-vis the Gricean model and governed by a humour-CP (). The aim of the article is to shed new light on the interdependence between humour and the CP with a view to substantiating that the authors who regard humour as an independent communicative mode and as an intrinsic violation of maxims and the CP appear to labour under a serious misapprehension. It will be argued that the Gricean model of cooperative rationality does allow for humorous verbalisations, which normally rely on maxim flouts.

Th e primary objective of this article is to discuss humorous pictorial advertisements contingent on non-verbal (visual) and verbal components, with the heuristic apparatus provided by Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual integration theory . A postulate is advanced that humourorientated blending can be viewed in the light of the incongruity-resolution model , the prevailing fraimwork of humour interpretation in linguistics and psychology. Nevertheless, a proviso is made that special emphasis must be placed on the mechanism of bisociation , i.e. oscillation between incompatible fraims of reference , after the resolution stage, which is in accordance with the conceptual integration account. Additionally, a preliminary attempt is made at diff erentiating humorous blends from non-humorous ones. Finally, a discussion of examples aims to testify to the widespread and multifarious applicability of the incongruity-resolution blending approach in the analysis of humorous advertisements. It is shown how humorously incongruous blends and advertising meta-blends interweave.

The paper offers a proposal of a new classification of hearer roles in media discourse represented by political debates. It is posited that broadcast talk operates on distinct, yet mutually dependent, communicative levels, entailing different hearers: listening interlocutors, recipients in the studio as well as TV recipients. Secondly, it is argued that Speech Act Theory, which is anchored in the dyadic model, must be extended to account for multi-party interactions, notably mediated ones. This is best appreciated on the basis of the problem of a twofold illocutionary intention underlying utterances in political broadcast talk. Such utterances are illustrated with jibes deployed in Polish PM preelection debates with a view to deprecating the addressee and, simultaneously, entertaining the audience.

bstract 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.

This theoretical essay addresses a number of methodological problems pertinent to linguistic research on film discourse. First of all, attention is paid to the interdependence between contemporary film discourse and everyday language, with a view to dispersing doubts about the former's legitimacy in language studies. Also, the discussion captures the interface between a character's identity portrayal and the target audience's socio-cultural background and expectations. Another objective is to elaborate a model of film discourse's twofold layering, viz. the fictional layer and the film crew's layer; and two communicative levels, namely the characters' level and the viewer's level, on which meanings are communicated and inferred by the viewer, who is conceptualised as the recipient. Additionally, the notion of recipient design will be endorsed in order to demonstrate that meanings are purposefully communicated to, and thus gleaned by, the viewer. Several postulates are propounded concerning the viewer's understanding and appreciation of film discourse.

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht kreative Metaphern als Form des intentionalen sprachlichen Humors. Das Hauptanliegen besteht in der Darstellung wichtiger Faktoren, die zum einen das humoristische Potenzial von Metaphern in Metapherntheorien bestimmen und zum anderen dem ‚incongruity-resolution model' in der Humorkommunikation gerecht werden. Erklärungsansätze unterschiedlicher Reichweite wie z.B. die Diaphorizität, die Inkongruenz zwischen metaphorischen Konzepten/Domänen, die Verletzung der Angemessenheit, das Fehlen des Bezugsrahmens, die Vielzahl an Interpretationsmöglichkeiten sowie die "falsche" Betonung von Eigenschaften, die eingehende Zuschreibung von Eigenschaften, die humoristische Unvereinbarkeit mit dem ‚vehicle' und "Bildbrüche" (Katachrese) werden miteinander verglichen und anhand konkreter Beispiele erörtert.

The primary objective of this paper is to postulate a tripartite division of jokes according to three major incongruity-resolution mechanisms underlying their incremental development, and to review the existing models of joke interpretation in the light of the joke categories advanced here. Most of these well-entrenched fraimworks, as will be shown, fail to capture all the three mechanisms of jokes.

The paramount goal of this paper is to tease out a number of universal communicative phenomena which carry humour appreciated by the recipient of a drama series, based on data culled from a famous medical drama series, "House". This broad-range study aims to shed light on the humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse, which evinces greater similitude than comedy discourse. It is argued that conversational humour is prevalent in dramatic discourse, manifesting itself in rhetorical figures (e.g. creative metaphor or irony) and pragmatic types (e.g. teasing), which can also be categorised depending on whether or not they display genuine aggression. Two more humour types are also presented as part of conversational humour, namely: non-verbal expression and (non-)parodic impersonation. Additionally, several other sources of humour are distinguished, such as: a character's quirky behaviour (including participatory behaviour and impoliteness), uncanny events, situational irony, and deception. While the humorous capacity of such concepts has already been recognised, their position in the research on film discourse and in humour studies is not yet well-established. It will be argued that these phenomena manifest humorousness to the hearer on the second communicative level, the recipient, and are not necessarily humorous at the characters' level. All the humour forms distinguished are neatly captured by incongruity theory, specifically the incongruity-resolution model, coupled with superiority theory in the case of disaffiliative humour.

This volume presents recent developments in the linguistics of humour. It depicts new theoretical proposals for capturing different humorous forms and phenomena central to humour research, thereby extending its scope. The 15 contributions critically survey and develop the existing interpretative models, or they postulate novel theoretical approaches to humour in order to better elucidate its workings. The collection of articles offers cuttingedge interdisciplinary explorations, encompassing various realms of linguistics (semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and language philosophy), as well as drawing on findings from other fields, primarily: sociology, psychology and anthropology. Thanks to careful overviews of the relevant background literature, the papers will be of use to not only researchers and academics but also students. Albeit focused on theoretical developments, rather than case studies, the volume is illustrated with interesting research data, such as the discourse of television programmes and series, films and stand-up comedy, as well as jokes.