Humour and language: an analysis of linguistic and extralinguistic features used in jokes

Abstract

Humour is an integral part of human behaviour. Nevertheless, its linguistic structure has not yet been fully understood. Through empirical research, this paper aims at discovering what linguistic devices make humour possible in jokes. Selecting a corpus of 200 jokes, we analysed the linguistic and extralinguistic features involved in the humoristic act. By means of a spreadsheet, we carried out a quantitative analysis, discovering all the possible linguistic, discursive and non-linguistic devices present in the object of study. We expected linguistic devices used in jokes to be evenly distributed among the different linguistic categories. However, our main findings were that more than half of the humorous acts used lexical or phonological devices such as homophony and homography as means to generate humour. The conclusion of this investigation is that jokes are constructed from the interplay of a variety of linguistic devices, even though some of them were more prominent than others. Furthermore, jokes prove to be a useful pedagogical instrument in EFL teaching environments because of the linguistic knowledge required to understand them.