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Library's collection Library's IT development CancelSo far, humor is analized from the psychological
point of view. There are only a few linguistic studies
about humor. Therefore, the writer attempts to develop
linguistic theory by analizing short-text humor in
Reader's Digest magazine of November 1993 edition. She
wanted to find out what linguistic element was violated
by short-text humors in that magazine.
To support her study, the writer used semantic and
pragmatic theories. Here, the semantic theory covered
semantic ambiguity (lexical and grammatical ambiguities)
and truth conditional semantics (including causal falla-cy),
whereas, the pragmatic one covered Austin's speech
acts theory and Grice's co-operative principle. Thus,
there are nine linguitic elements, i.e. : lexical ambi-guity,
grammatical ambiguity, truth conditional seman-tics,
causal fallacy, speech acts, maxim of quality,
maxim of quantity, maxim of relevance and the last is
maxim of manner. Each humor, except the non-linguitic
ones, violated one of them.
In a humor, there was a semantic mechanism working
in it. This mechanism arranged the humor so it sounded
funny. After understanding the humor through its semantic
mechanism, the writer could justify which linguistic
element was violated by the humor.
The writer used qualitative approach in this study
because it was a case study. Furthermore, she also used
quantitative data in analizing the data. She collected
all short-texts humor in Reader's Digest of November 1993
edition as her source of data.
The analysis of the data contained two parts. The
first was the analysis of semantic mechanisms of humor
and the second was the analysis of linguistic element
violations. From the first one, the writer found that
most humor used unexpected meaning to surprise the read-ers
and only one humor used expected meaning. The later
analysis let the writer to find that speech acts was the
most frequently violated linguistic element.