PRAGMATICS AND HUMOR

It is amazing how many ways we have of displaying and presenting various types of lexical and pragmatic information. These displays and presentations are at various levels of abstraction, detail and presentation medium. They are chosen to represent time, space, significance, and other relative differences.

Consider the following: Advertisement, Audio-Visual Aid, Bar Graph, Bell-Shaped Curve, Blood Lines, Caricature, Cartoon, Category, Cause-Effect Line, Chain of Command, Chinese Boxes, Drawing, Family Tree, Floor Plan, Flow Chart, Hierarchy, Map, Matrix, Musical Score, Outline, Photograph, Diagram (e.g. Reed Kellogg), Set, Sketch, Time Line, Tree Diagram, Venn Diagram, etc. This lexical and pragmatic information can be presented over various mediums. Consider the following: Book, Card Catalogue, Catalogue, Chalk Board, Cell Phone, Internet, Journal, Magazine, Movie, PowerPoint, Radio, Skype, Teleconference, Telephone, Video Stream, Webinar, White Board, Zoom, etc. And information can be organized alphabetically, numerically, sequentially, spatially, etc.

Lexical items can also be semantically weighted, and related to other lexical items in various ways, and these weightings and relationships can be quantified (always, usually, sometimes, seldom, never, etc. I believe that the most important feature of Linguistics Pragmatics is that it is unlike all of the other levels of linguistics (Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics) by being a non-linear approach. Kenneth Pike said that language can be viewed as Particles, as Waves (assimilation or dissimilation), or as Field. It is only Pragmatics that looks at language as Field (see above).

Another very important aspect of Pragmatics is the developing field of Script-Model Grammar. Victor Raskin is a linguist, and linguists tend to deal with one sentence at a time. Script Model Grammar allows linguists to deal with larger texts. Raskin talks about the structure of a joke by saying that everything in the set-up of the joke is ambiguous but primed in the direction of the mundane. What the punch line of a joke does is to change the priming of the joke from the mundane to the dramatic, or scatological, etc. At this point the audience is able to see that the entire joke—set-up and punch line—have been ambiguous, and that the punch line has just changed the priming. Because the punch line allows the audience to see all of the ambiguity of the joke (both mundane and dramatic), the punch line is very epiphanal.

Using the techniques of Script-Model Grammar as developed by Victor Raskin, Salvatore Attardo and others, develop a number of mundane scripts for your computer, as follows:

Eating at a restaurant

Getting a haircut

Getting dressed in the morning

Going to a concert

Going to a movie

Telling a joke or a story

Traveling by car

Traveling by plane

Traveling by subway

Traveling by train

Etc.

Tell your computer the details of the script in terms of a sequence of behaviors. For example, consider the script of “eating at a restaurant.”

1. You get hungry.

2. You look for a restaurant.

3. You find a restaurant.

4. You walk into the restaurant.

5. You’re seated by someone.

6. The server brings you a menu.

7. You look at the menu.

8. You order your meal.

9. You eat your meal.

10. Someone brings you a bill.

11. You pay the bill.

12. You leave a tip.

13. You leave the restaurant.

But what if one or more of the sequence of behaviors is missing? Or what if one or more behaviors are added to the sequence? The computer can then ask, “Why didn’t he leave a tip? Or “Why did he take his bike into the restaurant?” The computer has been taught how to speculate.

What Victor Raskin did for jokes (small texts), Salvatore Attardo and others did for larger texts (paragraphs, chapters plays, novels, trilogies, etc.). And rather than just dealing with the set-up, the punch-line, and the epiphany of the joke, Attardo developed ways of dealing with double entendre, embodiment, irony, metaphor, metonymy, paradox, parody, sarcasm, satire, synecdoche, allegory, and other types of “language play.” An even more important contribution of Script-Model Grammar, is its applications to the field of Artificial Intelligence. This brings us to the contributions of Christian Hempelmann, Anton Nijholt, Dallin Oaks, Leo Obrst, Maxim Petrenko, Graeme Ritchie, Julia Taylor, Willibald Ruch, Oliviero Stock, Carlo Strapparava, Igor Suslov, and Tony Veale.

Note that Noam Chomsky’s Generative Transformational Grammar has now become Deep Learning in the field of computers. Computers are now able to generate both language and images by receiving input from the entire internet, recombining this information in very sophisticated ways, and producing computer-generated material that is the same as human-generated material, only better. It’s very scary.