Publication details
Semiotics of Humor : Unraveling the Dynamics of Resemiotization
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Punctum. International Journal of Semiotics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | Link to full text |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.18680/hss.2025.0001 |
| Keywords | humour; semiotics; pragmatics; multimodality; discourse |
| Attached files | |
| Description | While semiotics and humor studies might strike one as rather different notions and perhaps even incompatible, they are not as strange bedfellows as they might seem at first glance. In fact, semiotics and humor studies share a common underlying aspect: they are both centrally concerned with semiosis as the process of meaning-making, having a decidedly semantic substance. Semiotics has emerged as a structuralist answer to the mechanism of how linguistic or other material forms are linked to meaning, stressing the conventional nature of the sign. Humor studies, which explore the semantic mechanisms producing a funny/entertaining effect (Attardo 2020:107), rely on the conventional nature of the sign (whether linguistic or non-linguistic), and more specifically, on situations where the conventionality gets disrupted by a perceived incongruity, i.e., a violation of one’s expectations, and the subsequent resolution of the incongruity, i.e., the ultimate assignment of a meaningful interpretation. |
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