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Have you ever, as a language teacher, as an educational researcher, or just as a language learner considered humor, language play, or generally funny and playful language use as an integral part of language teaching and learning? Have you ever considered that humor and language play are not just for entertainment and laughter, but could guide language learners to an overall understanding of language...
Three related studies are presented with the aim of investigating the individual differences in humour appreciation, sensation seeking and need for closure. In order to accomplish this, the construction and initial validation of a new instrument will be presented. The Humour Structure Appreciation Scale (HSAS) distinguishes between incongruity-resolution (INC-RES), and nonsense (NON) humour. The first...
Derrida saw laughter as a version of aporia; and he linked aporia to an undecidability that he ties to fiction. I argue that such undecidability contributes to some jokes. Sometimes this undecidability enables the joke to combine plausibility and delightfulness. More interesting and more aporetic is the way that undecidability contributes to jokes that foreground their textual status (some meta-jokes...
A literature review reveals the lack of empirical and theoretical work dedicated to systematically grasping the diversity of cartoons. Most studies have focused on political and/or editorial cartoons and have neglected other subgenres, which however are gaining space in many forms of media-such as gag cartoons. Taking genre discursive studies as a starting point, this paper is aimed at distinguishing...
Failed humour can be explained by communicative gaps, at either the semantic or pragmatic levels, but sometimes, after all is ‘said and done’, people resist humour for purely discursive reasons. Some may recognise the divisive nature of a humorous text, and experience conflicting feelings. Others may welcome humour purely because of its appeal to ideology, while the text itself may not be considered...
Using an empirical approach, this study addresses the question whether followers of different religious beliefs (Christians, Muslims, and Hindus), as well as Atheists and Agnostics manifest different senses of humour when rating a variety of jokes. The study further investigates whether one’s religious background influences the threshold of what is considered offensive. And finally, it seeks to answer...
Studies on humour have indicated that humour has a lot to offer to both language teachers and learners. Creating a positive classroom environment and lowering affective barriers to language learning are among the several effects of humour. However, the appreciation of humour can be culture-specific and context-dependent. For example, greater values may lie in the employment of humour in English as...
This paper looks at multimodal humour through the lens of prototype theory in the framework of conventional incongruity theory of humour, aiming for a unified linguistic and semiotic approach to humour. From this perspective, humour can be achieved through the following three aspects of linguistic and non-linguistic categories: 1) prototypicality versus non-prototypicality of category members; 2)...
Many of Ernst Cassirer’s later works are concerned with the dangers of political myth. His analysis speaks at length about the role of philosophy during the rise of the Third Reich, and Cassirer argues that philosophers failed to combat the dominant ideology. Today, philosophers struggle to explain their relevance to greater public and governmental powers that see no intrinsic value. Given the current...
The article focuses on the interpretation of political cartoons and the means of expression a cartoonist uses to convey a message: visual metaphors, visual metonymies as well as metaphors inferred from the image and/or text. The metaphors and visual metonymies in the cartoons are analyzed from the point of view of Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy Theory. In the analysis, visual and inferential metaphors...
This special issue of the EJHR, inspired by the humour session of the 7th Across Borders conference. held in Tartu, Estonia in April 2017, refocuses on Eastern Europe then. While in 5.2 humour from Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Russia and Turkey was represented, here Poland, Hungary, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania add to the picture, while Belarus, Montenegro and Turkey remain...
The Second Conference on Historical Humour took place on October 26-27, 2017 at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw (Poland). The conference was organised by its Department of Language History of the Institute of Polish Philology. 25 representatives of various research centers in Poland took part in the conference. The aim of the meeting was to deepen interest in humour in its historical...
This study focuses on the women policies of the Turkish government and the female humour that is created in response to these policies. A humour magazine is used as the main source since this specific magazine, which is named Bayan Yanı (The Seat Next to a Lady), has the privilege of being the only humour magazine created solely by female caricaturists and writers in Turkey. Six samples of female...
In my research paper I examine the first two election campaigns in Hungary following the Astro-Hungarian Compromise (1867), in particular, the ways the campaigns employed tools of humour in popular press products of the time, such as caricatures and texts in humour magazines (Ludas Matyi [‘Mattie the Goose-Boy’], Az Üstökös [‘The Comet’], Borsszem Jankó [‘Jonny Peppercorn’]), which were considered...
This paper is a tribute to Belarusian folklorist and ethnographer Uladzimir Sysou (1951-1997) whose extensive legacy includes collecting 139 jokes during his field research in southern Belarus in 1995. Due to his untimely death, these jokes and other folklore items remain unpublished and have, to my knowledge, not been noticed by folklorists. Half of the collected jokes focus on family relations,...
The empirical analysis in this paper deals with establishing humour examples based on script opposition patterns in online comments regarding Montenegro’s accession to NATO. It is established that the opposing scripts prevailing in the comments on political setting in Montenegro are heavily dependent on Montenegro’s turbulent history and dominant collective scripts such as pride and bravery. As online...
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