The joke: a cognitive model of a speech genre

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to apply cognitive linguistic methods to the analysis of the speech genre of jokes in order to present a cultural model of joking observed in terms of its universal characteristics and cultural peculiarities. For the purpose of describing culturally specific variations of the model there were used data of two different languages -American English and Russian. Traditionally the analysis of verbal humor, i.e. of jokes, witty remarks, and ironical comments belongs to the field of rhetoric and discourse studies. The concept of speech genre put by modern scholars in the forefront of investigation allows scholars to raise a problem of genre expectations or genre framing. In the case of jokes, genre expectations can be described as a set of semantic characteristics that the ideal joke is supposed to have; these characteristics are shared by communicants and function as an inherent norm for the act of joking. The concept of genre expectations is based on the broad understanding of a context including both a cultural context and a context of a speech situation. The cultural context can be effectively described by the method of conceptual analysis used in cognitive linguistics. The method allows one to gather basic characteristics of the concept of jokes and joking by analyzing a wide scope of semantic collocations and metaphorical derivation of the words joke, joking, jest, etc. The pattern of distribution of the basic cognitive characteristics of jokes shows that the genre may exist in two possible types: as a friendly and playful discourse and as an aggressive and insulting act-the actualization of these possibilities depends on a situation of speech. As for cultural differences, they mostly depend on various priorities of cognitive characteristics peculiar to different languages.