Abstract
Linguistically speaking, the concept of humor, which seems to be vast for people, has specific dimensions by which it is generated including: puns, irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and contrastive utterances in relation to the speakers of those utterances. It is about how the extra linguistics elements dominate the situation and the delivery of humor. The researchers of the present paper intend to show how the selected literary extract can be subjected to a linguistic pragmatic analysis and then be explained by applying the incongruity theory of humor by Kant (1790) in order to show the ways or the mechanisms that lead to the flouting, infringing and the violation of Gricean maxims can consequently lead to the creation of humor. Despite the fact that the present paper is qualitative in nature, some tables are provided by the researchers in order to reach into a better, deeper and more understandable analysis. Investigating the ways Gricean maxims are flouted, infringed and violated to create humor, and showing how the imperfect use of language sometimes create unintentional humor are the researchers’ aims of this paper. Keywords: pragmatics, humor, implicature, Gricean maxims, Measure for Measure
Highlights
IntroductionThe idea of humor led to its use to refer to any behavior that may contain any kind of deviation from the social norms
During the sixteenth century, the idea of humor led to its use to refer to any behavior that may contain any kind of deviation from the social norms
This section is intended to examine an extract from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. This examination is based on specific steps; first, identifying the utterances which include the flouting and violation; second; second, investigating how these utterances are flouted and violated by identifying what maxim is flouted, infringed or violated and showing how each maxim generates its own implicature produced by the characters; third, applying the incongruity theory of humor on the flouted and the violated utterances; and the last step is to differentiate between the creation of intentional and unintentional humor produced by the characters
Summary
The idea of humor led to its use to refer to any behavior that may contain any kind of deviation from the social norms. His paper is different from other studies, i.e. Conversational Implicature Analysis of Humor in American Situation Comedy Friends by Xiaosu (2008), Pragmatic Analysis of Ironic Humour in Black Books by Savkanicova (2013) and Verbal Humor in TV-Sitcom Blackadder: A Pragmatic and Rhetorical Analysis by Kalliomaki (2005), since, first, humor has not been pragmatically studied to analyze Measure for Measure by Shakespeare using Grecian maxims. All of these studies neither apply the most dominant theory of humor which is that of Kant’s incongruity theory nor the other two; relief and superiority theories in their analyses
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