Salvatore Attardo's Abstracts Pages
Non-literalness and non-bona-fide in language: An
approach to formal and computational treatments of humor
Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo
Pragmatics & Cognition, v2(1), 1994
Abstract
The paper is devoted to the study of humor as an important pragmatic phenomenon
bearing on cognition, and, more specifically, as a cooperative mode of non-bona-fide
communication. Several computational models of humor are presented in increasing order
of complexity and shown to reveal important cognitive structures in jokes. On the basis of
these limited implementations, the concept of a full-fledged computational model for the
understanding and generation of humor is introduced and discussed in various aspects.
The model draws upon the authors' General Theory of Verbal Humor, with its six
knowledge resources informing a joke, and on SMEARR, a sophisticated semantic-
network-based computational lexical environment. The relevance of the approach to the
interpretation, generation, and cognitive structure of humor is discussed in the broader
context of the nature of the cooperative non-bona-fide modes of communication.
Back to the main page:
Back to the beginning.
Back to the abstracts page:
Back where you came from.