A Graph-theoretic Approach To Verbal Humor

The research of humor has a long-dated history, which has attracted much academic interest in the field of philology, literature, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and culture studies. The traditional works on humor have converged in the representative schools of incongruity, superiority, and release theories.The more recent linguistic studies of verbal humor are represented by Raskin's (1985) Semantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and Attardo & Raskin's (1991) General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). Drawing on the notion of script, SSTH develops on the incongruity-resolution theory by identifying the mechanisms of script overlap and script oppositeness to account for the necessary and sufficient conditions for a text to be funny. It is also a systematic application of semantic theory to the study of humor. As a revised version of SSTH, GTVH extends the research purview to the general body of verbal humor by proposing a hierarchy of six Knowledge Resources (KRs): script opposition (SO), logical mechanism (LM), situation (SI), target (TA), narrative strategy (NS) and language (LA). A careful distinction of them and their relations serves to formulate the degree of joke similarity.But neither SSTH nor GTVH can adequately address the issue of humor interpretation, a challenge that is taken by this paper. In practice, the current research follows the linguistic tradition of humor representation and attempts to formalize the essential features of humorous texts and their interpretations. Methodologically, it adopts the useful tool introduced by Attardo et al. (2002) into the study of humor—graph theory. While Attardo et al. represent a transitional effort from the script-based tradition to a set-theoretic or graph-theoretic account of verbal humor, the model built in this work—a Reduced Graph Model of Jokes (RGMJ)—has more adequately revealed to what extent graph theory can be incorporated into humor research.In this sense RGMJ is an outgrowth of Attardo et al. (2002)'s precursory graph-theoretic account on the basis of SSTH and GTVH, but is much refined in the formal details and much strengthened in its applicability. It is thus to the exposition and application of RGMJ that the main body of this dissertation is devoted. But unlike GTVH, the model of RGMJ does not seek to represent verbal humor in general. Rather it is restricted to dealing with the more manageable jokes.The general architecture of RGMJ is designed according to the canonical sense of...