This book is partly based on my 2014 PhD thesis on enthymemes in conversation, and developing it into a "real" book has been a challenging and lengthy process. However, I have had lots of help and support from a number of people who all have contributed to also make this process stimulating and enjoyable. First, I should mention Robin Cooper and Christine Howes who have tirelessly read and commented on various parts and versions of this book, not to mention helping me develop many of the ideas presented here in our two projects on reasoning in dialogue-"Incremental reasoning in Dialogue" and "Dialogical reasoning in patients with schizophrenia". I also owe a great thanks to Staffan Larsson for relentlessly pointing out ttr errors and being generally helpful and supportive. Other people who have contributed, either by working with me on things related to enthymemes and topoi, or by reading and commenting on parts of this book at various stages of gestation, are
In this paper we treat humorous situations as a series of events underpinned by topoi, principles of reasoning recognised within a socio-cultural community. We claim that humorous effect in jokes and other discourse is often created by the juxtaposition of topoi evoked. A prerequisite for this is that there is a shift where the interpreter of the discourse updates their information state with regard to a second topos being evoked. This view of humour is consistent with an incremental analysis of dialogue, and we therefore argue that interaction is central both for humour creation and interpretation. We point out some different ways in which topoi are juxtaposed in humorous dialogues as well as in jokes published in social media or in joke books, and take jokes from the coronavirus pandemic as an example because this makes lots of new topoi available and therefore offers the opportunity of creating novel jokes based on the juxtaposition of the new and existing topoi. We explore how the mechanisms of inference in dialogue can be applied to humour through the four elements from our title: old (existing), new (not previously existing), borrowed (associated with a different situation) and taboo (inappropriate in the context).
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