Reinterpretation and viewpoints
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Graeme Ritchie
Abstract
It has often been observed that many jokes rely on the audience reinterpreting the initial part of the joke once the punchline is encountered. In order to elaborate on this account, we outline how these reinterpretations may happen in various ways. The examples we consider suggest that the generalization is best stated not in terms of syntactic or even semantic forms, since the same mechanism seems to occur in jokes presented visually or partly verbally, partly visually. We sketch an analysis using separate but related viewpoints (expressible in terms of mental spaces), concluding that the revised interpretation may occur in any nested viewpoint, and need not be adopted by the audience as a factually correct interpretation.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Cognitive linguistic approaches to humor
- Looking back: Joke comprehension and the space structuring model
- Reinterpretation and viewpoints
- Pragmatics of performance and the analysis of conversational humor
- The cognitive mechanisms of adversarial humor
- Cognitive linguistics and humor
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Cognitive linguistic approaches to humor
- Looking back: Joke comprehension and the space structuring model
- Reinterpretation and viewpoints
- Pragmatics of performance and the analysis of conversational humor
- The cognitive mechanisms of adversarial humor
- Cognitive linguistics and humor
- Book reviews
