Abstract
This research is conducted to reveal how humorous utterances are constructed by manipulating semantic meaning especially dealing with lexical semantics. Lexical semantics provides multiple meanings that portray their meanings’ relationship among a word and they are potentially exploited to elicit humor. This research examines utterances manipulating lexical semantics as the strategy of humor creation in Mind Your Language situation comedy. Applying a descriptive qualitative approach, the findings indicate that five types of lexical semantics are utilized as strategies of humorous utterances creation. Those types of lexical semantics are polysemy, homonymy, homophone, hyponymy, dan synonymy. Because of their multiple relation meanings, the speaker can refer to other meanings to construct different meanings with the hearer. The speaker constructs an incongruent meaning between what the hearer’s perception is and what the speaker meant. The deviation of lexical semantics between the hearer and the speaker completely illustrates the concept of incongruity theory of humor.Â
Highlights
Ross (2005) conceptualizes humor as a certain quality or potential of somebody or something to be funny and amusing
The findings show that the forms of lexical semantics employed to create humor are polysemy, homonymy, homophone, hyponym, and synonym
A meaning of a word manipulated by a speaker commonly opposites hearer’s perception of the meaning of the similar word. It means that the humorous utterance can be constructed by utilizing a word that has more than one meaning as it shows by lexical semantics
Summary
Ross (2005) conceptualizes humor as a certain quality or potential of somebody or something to be funny and amusing. The speaker can manipulate some linguistic aspects such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantic, and pragmatic to create humorous discourse. The exploitation of those linguistic aspects in verbal humor is closely related to the incongruity theory of humor. Attardo (1994) highlights that incongruity is based on the discovery of a reality or a thought that turns out to be inconsistent with what was expected. It means that the main characteristic of that theory of humor is incongruences. A distorted linguistics aspect could be represented by an odd linguistic expression, contradiction, bewildering, or disordering hearer’s perception. Berger (1976) underlines that incongruity can be applied linguistically in syllables, words, phrases, and meanings to create humor
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