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Linguistic Humor and Verbal Comedy Foundations: Analyzing Wordplay, Ambiguity, Pragmatics, and Semantic Structures in Humorous Communication
Paperback
Literary CriticismGeneral ReferenceLinguistics
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 18 2026
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.47 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
A clear, hands-on guide to how humor works in language. This book examines the mechanics behind jokes, puns, irony, and comic turns of phrase, showing how laughter is shaped by sound, structure, meaning, and context. It treats humor not as a loose cultural afterthought, but as a system that can be described, compared, and analyzed with precision.
Moving from foundational definitions to detailed case studies, the book explains how ambiguity, pragmatics, semantic mismatch, and discourse structure interact to create comic effect. Readers will see how punchlines depend on reanalysis, how speakers imply more than they say, and how wordplay exploits homophones, polysemy, morphology, and spelling. The discussion also covers irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, deadpan delivery, politeness, face management, and the social meanings carried by humor in interaction.
What the book covers- Linguistic basics for analyzing humorous communication, including phonology, syntax, semantics, and discourse.
- Wordplay mechanisms such as puns, homophones, near-homophones, and visual or morphological play.
- Pragmatic inference, including implicature, indirectness, and violations of conversational expectations.
- Semantic structures, including frames, selectional restrictions, metaphor, metonymy, contradiction, and incongruity.
- Social and interactional dimensions, such as politeness, identity marking, timing, setup, and punchline structure.
The later chapters provide step-by-step analytical workflows and annotated examples, making the material useful for students, teachers, researchers, and anyone who wants a more exact understanding of how humorous language is built. The result is both theoretical and practical, with guidance on corpus building, annotation, reliability, and explanation writing.
Whether the goal is close reading, linguistic research, or teaching humor analysis, this volume offers a structured way to describe why a line works, what makes it funny, and which language features carry the effect.
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