Ambiguity in Indonesian Jokes on the Instagram “Dagelan”

Abstract

This study aims firstly to capture some linguistic aspects of ambiguity-based jokes and secondly to identify and explain the types of ambiguity involved in each joke. The data are 100 ambiguous jokes found on the Instagram account, “Dagelan”. The result of the study is that jokes are formed with conversation, sentences consisting of independent clauses and subordinate/dependent clauses such as adverbial clauses, relative clauses, simple sentence from independent clauses, multiple independent clauses and even some jokes are just made from smaller linguistic forms such as words, and phrases. When it comes to the types of ambiguity involved, there are 10 types of jokes such as lexical ambiguity based jokes, around 38% of the total, followed by phonological ambiguity based jokes at 19%, and lexicalization of larger unit based jokes at 11%, pragmatic ambiguity based jokes at 13%, textual cohesion based jokes at 8%, syntactic ambiguity based jokes at 5%, orthographic jokes at 2%, multiple ambiguity jokes at 2%, type of modality jokes and deictic reference jokes at 1%.