Arabic Humorous Texts: An Attempt to Analyze

Abstract

Humor has been studied in different fields, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literature. It attracted the attention of numerous scholars, such as Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Freud...etc However, the systematic linguistic study of humor approximately started at the end of the previous century. Since that time, linguists began to study humor from different perspectives such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics. Although they have presented various studies of humor, humor is still a significant topic for research because it is involved in every aspect of human life. The aim of this research is to review the various models and theories that were created to analyze humorous forms. It handles the philosophical theories, psychological and cognitive studies. It also instances the language-based models put forth to examine the humorous texts. Finally, the researcher attempts to demonstrate the different linguistic mechanisms of producing humor and to present a linguistic analysis of some forms of humor. This study will examine humor from two linguistic perspectives: the semantic and the pragmatic. To achieve this purpose, the researcher will use two linguistic frameworks: the cooperative principle (CP) proposed by Grice (1975) and the General Theory of verbal humor presented by Attardo and Raskin (1991) and its modification by Attardo (2001).