Linguistic Features of Humor in Academic Writing

Stephen Skalicky ,Cynthia M Berger ,Scott A Crossley ,Danielle S Mcnamara

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.3p.248

Stephen Skalicky , Cynthia M Berger + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.3p.248

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Abstract

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall Humor component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also scored for overall writing quality by human raters, which correlated (r = .195) with the humor component score. Correlations between the humor component scores and linguistic features were examined. To investigate the potential for linguistic features to predict the Humor component scores, regression analysis identified four linguistic indices that accounted for approximately 17.5% of the variance in humor scores. These indices were related to text descriptiveness (i.e., more adjective and adverb use), lower cohesion (i.e., less paragraph-to-paragraph similarity), and lexical sophistication (lower word frequency). The findings suggest that humor can be partially predicted by linguistic features in the text. Furthermore, there was a small but significant correlation between the humor and essay quality scores, suggesting a positive relation between humor and writing quality. Keywords : humor, academic writing, text analysis, essay score, human rating

Highlights

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing
The current prevailing linguistic view of humor is a model known as the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH; Attardo & Raskin, 1991), which posits that incongruity between speech scripts or schemas is the primary mechanism underlying humor
We only focus on the Humor subscale, which was used in a subsequent regression analysis, along with the previously discussed linguistics variables, in order to examine the potential for language features to predict the presence of humor in the essays

Summary

Introduction

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. To investigate the potential for linguistic features to predict the Humor component scores, regression analysis identified four linguistic indices that accounted for approximately 17.5% of the variance in humor scores These indices were related to text descriptiveness (i.e., more adjective and adverb use), lower cohesion (i.e., less paragraph-to-paragraph similarity), and lexical sophistication (lower word frequency). Do linguistic features of academic writing (e.g., lexical, rhetorical, cohesive) correlate with ratings of humor in academic writing?. This theory has some empirical support in both neurobiological (Coulson & Kutas, 2001; Sheridan et al, 2009) and psycholinguistic (Vaid et al, 2003) approaches Another method to better understand how linguistic features contribute to humorous incongruity comes from the field of computational linguistics. Stylistic features, such as alliteration, antonymy, and adult slang; contentbased features of the texts (i.e., words specific to text types); and cohesive features (i.e., semantic overlap) of texts were found to distinguish humorous from non-humorous one-liners using computational text selection methods

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