TY  - JOUR
TT  - VIOLATION OF GRICE’S MAXIMS AND AMBIGUITY IN ENGLISH LINGUISTIC JOKES
AU  - Taghiyev, Ilham
PY  - 2017
DA  - April
DO  - 10.18769/ijasos.309688
JF  - IJASOS- International E-journal of Advances in Social Sciences
JO  - IJASOS
PB  - OCERINT International Organization Center of Academic Research
WT  - DergiPark
SN  - 2411-183X
SP  - 284
EP  - 288
VL  - 3
IS  - 7
KW  - Grice’s maxims
KW  - English humor
KW  - Linguistic jokes
KW  - ambiguity
N2  - The English believe that being English isfirst of all having a good sense of humor. Therefore, a shameful thing for themis to be regarded as a person with no sense of humor. Thus, English humor,which is very sophisticated, aristocratic and subtle, is widely used in theireveryday life. This paper aims to find out the relationship between theviolation of Grice’s maxims and the ambiguity that induce humor and laughter ineach case of violation. The presentpaper studies the types of ambiguity which are the most popular device in theprocess of creation of English linguistic verbal jokes matching them to theviolation of Grice’s maxims that form an important constituent of linguisticverbal jokes. First, Grice’s Cooperative Principles, their violation and theway how they are violated are considered. Then, ambiguity in English linguisticjokes is defined and categorized. After that, ten randomly chosen Englishlinguistic jokes (five lexical-semantic and five structural-syntactic jokesrespectively) are analyzed demonstrating the violation and the manner ofviolation of Grice’s maxims in them.If people saidexactly what they meant, and if people understood their interlocutors’intention and interpreted what they heard correctly, there would be nolinguistic humor. According to American philosopher Paul Grice, people observecertain cooperative principle to conduct successful interaction. Thus, Gricesuggests four main maxims (or super maxims) viz. maxims of quantity, quality,relation and manner within his famous Cooperative Principles, the violation ofwhich can cause misunderstanding that is one of the main sources of linguisticjokes. The above four super maxims can be violated in four ways: 1) quietly andunostentatiously, 2) by opting out of a maxim, 3) coping with a clash betweenmaxims, and 4) flouting a maxim in order to exploit it. (Grice, 1975, pp.45-49).In linguistics, ambiguity is defined aswords, phrases or sentences that express more than one meaning. (Crystal, 2008,p.22). According to another definition, ambiguity is a construction whichadmits more than one interpretation. Salvatore Attardo et al. (1994), in theirstudy of a corpus of two thousand jokes, found out that four hundred andthirty-one of the four hundred and forty-one verbal jokes, i. e. aboutninety-eight percent, were ambiguity based. Ambiguity itself falls two maintypes – lexical-semantic and structural-syntactic. In the first case, any wordor sentence has more than one meaning, in the second case, the role of any wordor its relation with other constituents in the sentence has more than onepossibility.In linguistic jokes, the humorous effect isachieved through lexical-semantic or structural-syntactic ambiguity whereGrice’s maxims are violated. Thus, the main conclusion will be as follows: In the first line of two-linear verballinguistic jokes, Grice’s maxims of quantity (make your contribution asinformative as required) and manner (avoid ambiguity) are violated. In thesecond line (punch line), Grice’s maxims of relation (be relevant) and manner(avoid ambiguity) are violated. Maxims of quantity and manner are violatedquietly and unostentatiously, whereas maxim of relation is violated by floutingthe maxim. The present studypaves the way for future studies in terms of finding out the relationshipbetween types of ambiguity in verbal linguistic jokes on the one hand, and theviolation of Grice’s maxims in these jokes and manner of this violation on theother.
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UR  - https://doi.org/10.18769/ijasos.309688
L1  - https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/298442
ER  -