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The Pragmatics of Humor in a Serious Story* Nº 67, enero - junio de 2017, pp. 09 - 29. Investigaciones Geográficas ISSN: 0213 - 4691. eISSN: 1989 - 9890. Instituto Interuniversitario de Geografía DOI: 10.14198/INGEO2017.67.01 Universidad de Alicante Cita bibliográfica: Díaz Cuevas, M.P., Pita López, M.F., Fernández Tabales, A., & Limones Rodríguez, N. (2017). Energía eólica y territorio en Andalucía: diseño y aplicación de un modelo de potencialidad para la implantación de parques eólicos. Investigaciones Geográficas, (67), 9-29. https://doi.org/10.14198/INGEO2017.67.01 View metadata,Energía citation and similar eólica papers at core.ac.uk y territorio en Andalucía:brought to you by CORE diseño y aplicación de un modeloprovided de by Repositorio potencialidad Institucional de la Universidad de Alicante para la implantación de parques eólicos ELUA, 31, 2017, págs. 311-326 DOI: 10.14198/ELUA2017.31.16 Wind energy and land in Andalusia: the design and application of a potential model to set up wind farms THE PRAGMATICS OF HUMOR IN A SERIOUS STORY* 1 LA PRAGMÁTICAMaría delDEL Pilar HUMOR Díaz EN Cuevas UNA HISTORIA SERIA María Fernanda Pita López2 Alfonso FernándezJEF VERSCHUEREN Tabales3 University of Antwerp 4 [email protected] Limones Rodríguez Recibido: 20/11/2016 ResumenAceptado: 05/05/2017 El trabajo analiza la potencialidadAbstract del territorio para la implantaciónResumen de parques eólicos en la Comu- nidad AutónomaIt is hardde Andalucía.to imagine a textPara more ello serious se construye than un Cuestamodelo imaginar locacional un texto utilizandomás serio que Tratadolas capacidades analíticas Saulde los Alinsky’s Sistemas Rules de for Información Radicals: A Pragmatic Geográfica para(SIG) Radicales: y las Técnicas Un Manual de Evaluaciónpara Radicales Multicriterio (EMC). EnPrimer este modelofor Realistic se señalarán Radicals las zonas(1971). conIt mayorRealistas potencialidad de Saul Alinsky para (1971).la implantación Es lo que el eólica, así como aquéllasis what en itslas titleque says,ésta resultaa set of desaconsejableguidelines for o inclusotítulo dice, incompatible un conjunto de directricescon otras para actividades aquellos y usos del territorio.those Los aspiring resultados to become ponen organizers en evidencia of societal la existenciaque aspiran de diversasa convertirse limitaciones en los organizadores en Andalucía del para el desarrollochange de la – energíarevolutionaries eólica, ofpero, some además kind, ythe sobre todo,cambio pueden social – revolucionarios ofrecer un instrumentode alguna clase, de gran uti- lidad para ‘realistic’un impulso kind. ordenado The guidelines del sectorare ‘pragmatic’ eólico en la región.la clase realista. Las directrices son ‘pragmáticas’ in its everyday sense, hence entirely down- en su sentido cotidiano y, por lo tanto, totalmente Palabrasto-earth. clave: Yet, Energía humor eólica; comes Territorio; in. This paperTécnicas depráctico. Evaluación Aún así, elMulticriterio; humor se introduce Sistemas en él. Este de Informa- ción Geográfica;explores oneAndalucía. of Alinsky’s educational stories trabajo explora una de las historias educativas de which clearly lacks overall humorous intent Alinsky que, sin tener un propósito humorístico, but still has the potential of scoring humorous tiene, sin embargo, el potencial de conseguir efectos Abstracteffects. An analysis of the example is used to humorísticos. El análisis de este ejemplo servirá This paperaddress analyzes the relationship the potential between of thehumor land and to set paraup windhacer farmsreferencia in aAndalusia la relación (Southernentre humor Spain). A locational seriousness.model using At thethe sameanalytical time it capabilities illustrates how of Geographicy seriedad. Information Asimismo, ilustra Systems cómo (GIS) la atención and Multi-cri- teria Evaluationsystematic Techniques attention to (EMC) the calibration has been of explicit built. Thissistemática will be ablea la tocalibración point out de lathe generación areas with de the grea- test potentialand forimplicit wind levels power, of meaningas well generationas those incan which losit isniveles inadvisable del significado or even explícito incompatible e implícito withse other be used in the investigation of humor. Some puede usar en la investigación del humor. Se harán activities andadditional land use.remarks The areresults made highlight about how the the existence algunas of severalobservaciones constraints adicionales in sobre Andalusia cómo este to develop wind energy,example but also relates and to abovesome of all, the they common provide notions a usefulejemplo tool to se promoterelaciona conthe algunas wind energyde las nociones industry in the region in anin theoriesorderly of fashion. humor. básicas en las teorías del humor. Key words:KEYWORDS: Wind energy; Humor, Territory; Seriousness, Multi-criteria Narrative, analysis;PALABRAS Geographical CLAVE: Information humor, System;seriedad, Andalusia. Explicitness/Implicitness, Pragmatics. narrativa, explicidad/ implicidad, pragmática. 1. Introducción * This paper was produced in the context of a collaborative project supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy Con unaand poblaciónCompetitiveness de through8.401.000 the grant habitantes FFI2015-64540-C2-1-P en 2014 (Sistema“Gender, humor de Información and identity: Development, Multiterritorial de Andalucía,consolidation 2015) y una and extensiónapplicability ofde linguistic 87.554 mechanisms km2, la Comunidadin Spanish” (MINECO-FEDER). Autónoma de It Andalucía was first presented posee un alto at the Workshop on Advanced Studies of Humor (WASHUM), 26-27 November 2015, in Alicante, Spain. I am grateful to ELUA’s anonymous reviewers for pointing out where I was too careless. 1 Departamento de Geografía Física y Análisis Geográfico Regional. Universidad de Sevilla. [email protected] 2 DepartamentoPara de citarGeografía este Físicaartículo y Análisis / To cite Geográfico this article: Regional. Verschueren, Universidad Jef de (2017).Sevilla. [email protected] The pragmatics of humor in 3 Departamentoa serious de Geografía story. FísicaELUA y, Análisis31: 311-326. Geográfico doi: 10.14198/ELUA2017.31.16 Regional. Universidad de Sevilla. [email protected] 4 Departamento de Geografía Física y Análisis Geográfico Regional. Universidad de Sevilla. [email protected] Enlace / Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/ELUA2017.31.16 Recepción: 07/11/2016. Aceptación: 10/04/2017. Publicación: 28/06/2017. Este trabajo se publicapublica bajo una licencia de CreativeCreative Commons Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial Reconocimiento-NoComercial 4.0 4.0 Internacional Internacional. 312 THE PRAGMATICS OF HUMOR IN A SERIOUS STORY 1. INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS When reading a recent pragmatics textbook such as Culpeper and Haugh (2014), it is striking how many of their examples to illustrate how ordinary language use works, are in fact jokes. Similarly, many of the examples to illustrate politeness and impoliteness in Kádár and Haugh (2013) are simply funny episodes from movies or television series. These observations made me wonder: If humor is so essential for pragmatics and specifically for politeness phenomena, did I ever write anything about humor? In my forty years of writing about pragmatic issues, the only episode I could find is the following: Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is predicated on a model of communication which attaches the highest normative value to demands for rationality and efficiency. As has often been observed in the pragmatic literature, however, social behavior also incor- porates norms which would seem to require breaches of the maxims. [p. 35] Norms of politeness, in particular, often do not allow for fully informative utterances, unmitigated truth, or complete clarity (see also 1.2.). It is this intuition that was captured by Dan at a pretheoretical level when he made the metapragmatic statement Just trying to be polite in (1)8. Similarly, there are types of verbal activity, such as those covered by the label humour, which would barely be possible with complete adherence to the maxims (see Illustration 2) – though a stretch of discourse which follows the maxims diligently might itself turn out to be quite humorous for precisely that reason. Politeness and humor both exploit the impossibility of full explicitness strategically, using many of the mechanisms described by Grice, to generate implicated meaning. (Verschueren 1999: 35-36) Not only is this, to the best of my recollection, the only written statement I ever made about humor – the same goes for politeness.1 Is it accidental, then, that I put these two phenomena, politeness and humor, in one paragraph in the only piece I have ever written about them? Looking at what I say in the above quotation, and comparing it with Culpeper & Haugh, for instance, there is a striking similarity. I talk about the exploitation of the impossibility of full explicitness. Culpeper & Haugh give the first four examples in their book – all jokes – in a section entitled “Beyond the linguistic code”, which is about the relationship between coded, and therefore decodable meaning on the one hand, and the extra, implicit meaning that is communicated and understood on the other, and they say “[…] we will simultaneously explore a number of jokes, not least because jokes often exploit the construction of meaning” (Culpeper and Haugh 2014: 2). The examples are the following: (1) A: Why can’t a man’s head be twelve inches wide? B: Er … don’t know. A: Because if it was, it would be a foot. (2) Q: How do you make a cat drink? A:
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