Differently amusing: mechanisms, types and modes of humour

The functioning of jokes and the humorous nature of long texts have both been widely dealt with in humour research, but the two ‘genres’ are mostly approached separately and with different analytical tools, ranging from cognitive categories to purely descriptive literary classifications (comedy, parody, satire), whereas language-based investigations of long texts are still few and tentative. This study seeks to fill this gap by enlarging and/or complementing existing linguistic criteria through the inclusion of narratological parameters, so as to offer a workable and coherent framework for the analysis of a broader and more varied body of humorous texts (including jokes and comic narratives as well as discursive text typologies). For this purpose, this work first systematizes linguistic pragmatic principles which are relevant to the analysis of humour-related phenomena; secondly, it introduces script theory, a cognitive model accounting for incongruity-resolution mechanisms of humour; thirdly, it extends script-based parameters by accommodating narratological notions so as ultimately to make it possible to design a theory of humorous types (for distinguishing between high- vs. low-narrativity texts, on the basis of their discursive or narrative character) and modes (for investigating the humorous potential of a text, which may be a core narratological quality or a surface instantiation).