Abstract
The present study aims at examining implicature in covid-19 Coronavirus jokes in the light of a neo-Gricean approach. For carrying out a meaningful analysis of jokes, an eclectic model is adopted. The data of the study consist of (25) electronic coronavirus English jokes. Only (10) are selected for data analysis. The analysis deals with jokes in terms of their types, principles breaking, and humor devices utilized to infer the meaning of the intended implicature. The jokes are analyzed according to Horn’s (1989/2004) neo-Gricean principles and Attardo’s (1997) Neo-Gricean distinction between two levels of cooperation: the illocutionary Cooperative Principle (ICP) and the Perlocutionary Cooperative Principle (PCP). A neo-Gricean type of principles breaking is conducted by adopting Thomas (1995). While humour devices are analyzed according to Dynel (2009). The data of the study were collected from WhatsApp, Facebook and some other network sources.
 Data analysis revealed that the (Quantity) Principle is more frequently broken than the (Relevance) Principle. The analysis showed that the ‘violation' of principles was more utilized type of breaking. In addition, ‘flouting’ and ‘opting out’ were also utilized in coronavirus jokes. As for humour devices, ‘sarcasm’, ‘irony’, ‘teasing’, and ‘self-denigrating’ were mostly used in Coronavirus jokes. This indicated that the major concern of the joke teller is criticism through humour.
Highlights
Humor is an overriding tool to achieve many purposes.during Covid 19 pandemic, people tend to resort to humor to create laughter in an attempt to cope with the situations they encounter and to connect with the world outside through the Internet
We present the analysis of of the data on the coronavirus jokes based on the eclectic model detailed in the aforementioned theoretical framework
The data analysis revealed the neo-Gricean Horn’s (2004) Q and R Principles, The Q Principle is found to be more unobserved than the R Principle. This is an indication that the implicature which creates humor in this types of jokes is mostly generated by not giving sufficient information and being obscure and ambiguous
Summary
Humor is an overriding tool to achieve many purposes. during Covid 19 pandemic, people tend to resort to humor to create laughter in an attempt to cope with the situations they encounter and to connect with the world outside through the Internet. Since jokes are mostly concerned with the intention of the speaker, it is important to link them to what is unsaid and intended Dolitsky (1983: 40) suggests three kinds of information that should be unsaid: shared knowledge which is known for both, information that is irrelevant to the context, and what is very relevant but unwilling to let other people know about She believes that it is necessary for the speaker, in a humorous interaction, to hide information from the hearer, that is making it implicit. With the aforementioned perspectives in mind, the present study is concerned with examining implicatures in Covid-19 coronavirus jokes to identify the meanings they imply, the joke-teller’s humorous intention according to a neo-Gricean approach. This study seems to be the first of its type to apply an eclectic neo-Gricean model Horn’s to deal with covid-19 coronavirus jokes
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