Linguistic Theories of Humor, 2nd Edition

3 The Analysis of Puns

Puns have been the object of significant amounts of research in the structuralist framework. As a matter of fact puns were seen as the only legitimate field for the interdisciplinary contacts between linguistics and humor studies, for quite a long time (this attitude was still present recently Pepicello and Weisberg 1983 and is critiqued in Raskin 1987d). To a certain extent, it is fair to say that the subject of puns is the area of humor research in which linguistics has traditionally been most active. Regardless of this fact, large parts of the territory of punning phenomena still remain uncharted. This is not to say that the efforts of linguists who have analyzed puns have been wasted. The prevalently taxonomic approach ...