The paper will discuss the following subtopics: Arthur Koestler's bisociation theory of humour and its reception; Victor Raskin's script-based theory of jokes (SSTH) in his "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor; the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo and the attempt of testing GTVH by Willibald Ruch; Salvatore Attardo's Linear Theory of Humor (IDM); The analysis of puns by Attardo; Humour and pragmatic maxims (Raskin, Attardo, etc.); Attardo's Setup-Incongruity-Resolution-model (SIR); The further taxonomy of "logical mechanisms" (LM) of jokes by Attardo, Hempelmann, and Di Maio; the "Anti-Festschrift" for Victor Raskin.
Abstract. The article aims to discuss the relationships between (verbal) humour and figurative speech, primarily focusing on the current theoretical dispute between the representatives of the 'classical' linguistic theories of humour (particularly Salvatore Attardo) and the younger generation of cognitive linguists (Kurt Feyaerts, Gert Brône, Tony Veale), and some contemporary psycholinguistic achievements (particularly Rachel Giora). The main conclusions suggested by the present state of the research are: (1) The cognitive similarity between metaphor and verbal humour is easy to recognize, but it is difficult to devise clear-cut theoretical criteria to distinguish between the two. (2) Considering the conceptual structure (interpretation, 'construal') of a narrower area, the following rule of thumb seems to hold: of the two incompatible scripts (~ schemas ~ frames ~ isotopies) involved in both metaphor and punchlined joke in the case of metaphor the first (overt, redundant) script 'wins', but in the case of joke the second (hidden, informative) prevails. (3) As the same conceptual tools are applicable to explain the perception of both funniness and figurativeness, these perceptions are definitely not discrete or exclusive, but continuous and gradual. To come closer to an 'ecologically valid' means of distinguishing between them, the cognitive theory should perhaps pursue a closer integration with researchers of the cultural and social aspects of human communication.
This study seeks to offer a brief empirical overview of jokes told in Estonia between the 1960s and the 1990s and introduces and tests two main suppositions: First, the period of Brezhnev's rule (and particularly the last part of it) was a golden era of joke-making in the former USSR and possibly in the countries of the Eastern Bloc in general, and second, a great amount of the joke material (especially political jokes) that circulated in Estonia in the Soviet period was of Russian origin. The article also addresses the issues of the temporal dynamics of the popularity of some joke characters (Juku, Chapaev, Jew R abinovich, Chukchi, Lenin, Stalin, Nikita (Khrushchev), Brezhnev, Gorbachev); the macaronic telling of Russian loan jokes; jokes of supposedly genuine Estonian origin, including examples of punning in Estonian, and bilingual puns in Estonian and Russian, jokes based on grammar, jokes based on toponyms and anthroponyms, jokes based on popular songs, etc. Brief concluding remarks discuss the general typological structure of canned (folkloric) jokes, the basic nature and specificity of Soviet-era jokes about Socialism, the problem of their function, and the main generic content clusters of jokes told in Soviet Estonia.
The present study is based on the Salaca Livonian dictionary compiled by Eberhard Winkler and Karl Pajusalu (Winkler, Pajusalu 2009), which assembles the vocabulary of all the Salaca Livonian sources. The Salaca Livonian dialect, which is a major variety of Livonian alongside Courland Livonian, was spoken in the vicinity of the river Salaca in northern Latvia until the mid-19th century. These areas were in direct contact with the areas of the Häädemeeste and Saarde subdialects of the southern group of the western dialect of North Estonian and the western dialects of South Estonian. The present study focuses on lexical relations between Salaca Livonian and its contact dialects as well as with the Estonian dialect area in general and makes an atttempt to explain what the vocabulary shared by Salaca Livonian and Estonian dialects could reveal about the development of Livonian. The closeness of lexical relations is established by means of a dialectometrical study, where at first the closeness of relations is calculated on the basis of the entire shared vocabulary, followed by closeness on the basis of infrequent and frequent vocabulary. The quantitative findings serve as the basis of a diachronic study of lexical relations between Salaca Livonian and the Estonian dialects. When taking into account the entire shared vocabulary, the links between Salaca Livonian and the southernmost South-Estonian dialects prove to be the strongest; however, the links between Salaca Livonian and western South-Estonian and West-Estonian subdialects rise to prominence as well. Analysis of less common vocabulary highlights the relation between Salaca Livonian and South Estonian even more; in the case of frequent words there is, in addition to South Estonian, a positive correlation with the insular dialects. All the three analyses show the closest link between the vocabulary of Salaca Livonian and the South-Estonian Leivu linguistic enclave.
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