• Oswald Steve

This proseminar explores the linguistic and pragmatic underpinnings of verbal humour and explores different fields of linguistics involved in humorous discourse, from phonology, morphology and syntax to the semantic and pragmatic dimension of language use. It offers a linguistically-grounded account of different humorous phenomena such as puns, jokes, understatements, exaggerations, irony, etc., in a variety of contexts (media discourse, advertising, political communication and conversational exchanges). From a theoretical perspective, the proseminar will review a number of approaches to verbal humour in order to provide the student with a range of different analytical tools to account for the humorousness of discourse. From an applied perspective, students will be led to analyse different types of humour in their contexts of occurrence so as to identify similarities and differences between the various manifestations of verbal humour. Since verbal humour many times plays with its audience’s interpretative processes, special attention will be paid to pragmatic approaches to verbal humour.

Attendance and participation are compulsory. A written essay (3’500 words) perhaps combined with an oral presentation, depending on attendance (to be decided in week 2 or week 3), will earn students the 6 ECTS.

At the end of the proseminar, students should be able to:

• know and explain the different linguistic dimensions involved the study of verbal humour
• be familiar with, understand, and be able to explain what the different theoretical approaches to verbal humour currently available amount to
• analyse any token of verbal humour from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective

The list of bibliographical references will be given session after session and made available on Moodle