The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes

Abstract: There is at present no theory of humour which reaches the standards of detail, precision, rigour and formality normally expected in computational linguistics, cognitive science or artificial intelligence. As a first step towards remedying this lack, I have been analysing simple verbalised humour (jokes). The plan is to define formal conditions which are sufficient to indicate whether a text is a joke, though not (at present) to indicate how funny the joke might be. That is, I am initially studying simple humorous stimuli, with a view to using the findings for broader investigations of how these stimuli are used. The endeavour has much in common with the methodological outlook of Chomskyan generative linguistics. So far, I have mainly studied two much-discussed classes of joke (possibly overlapping) -- the pun, and the type of joke where the punchline forces re-interpretation of earlier material. In this talk I will discuss the motivation for and assumptions of the work, and I will summarize some preliminary proposals.

Bio:

Dr Graeme Ritchie is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and from October 2001 to September 2002 he is a Leverhulme Research Fellow (visiting Macquarie University until April 2002). He has worked in computational linguistics since 1973, and has published a wide range of papers, on topics including parsing, morphology, semantic interpretation, question-answering systems, computer creativity, and humour.

Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au