Humour: an Anatomy & Physiology [antikvár]

I. INTRODUCTIONThis work is an attempt at re-discussing humour in one of its relatively poorly studied fields of manifestation, that of humourous verse.The mobile of any attempt at offering a new point of view (on humour, in our case) should be and has been a higher validity as compared to previous ones, i.e. a higher degree of generality and a wider rangé of application. This should account for the choice of humourous verse as a domain of analysis, as well, because of somé of its specific features, on the one hand, which permit a quick identification of the mechanisms involved in the production of humour, and, on the other hand, because it will result, after analysis, that the linguistic mechanisms of humour are identical regardless of the type of text they might appear in, i.e., that they are not specific to literary genre or species. Theoreticálly, then," linguistic mechanisms of humour ought to be universalia of humour, relative as to language and specific to what will be further defined as humour as artefact", a category which includes literary humour.The relative universality of linguistic mechanisms of humour will be postulated after demonstrating their dependence upon such linguistic uni-versals as synonymy, homonymy, paronymy etc. It ensues that the analysis will be performed with linguistic instruments upon a corpus which will be selected from two non-cognate Indo-European languages (English and Románián). The method adopted will be binary analysis into categories and subcategories after applying several criteria which will be defined further.Since the response to potentially humourous statements on situations implies the cognitive process of understanding (in one of its particular acceptations, at least), the analysis will resort first and foremost to logical categories, therefore a more accurate name of the mechanisms involved in the production of humour would be logical-linguistic mechanisms^. Yet, since there is a wide category of non-language-specific mechanisms of1 term used as .,/>roccdee lingvislico-logice" by Marian Popa (Popa, 1975, p.307)