The Evolution of the SSTH Into the GTVH and Now Into the OSTH 309

398 Abstracts

1 VICTOR RASKIN, CHRISTIAN F. HEMPELMANN AND JULIA M. TAYLOR 2 3 How to Understand and Assess a Theory: The Evolution of the 4 5 SSTH into the GTVH and Now into the OSTH 6 7 The main thrust of this paper is to present to an important adjacent scholarly 8 community of literary scholars how humor can be treated by the current strand of 9 contemporary linguistics, or – more specifically – by linguistic semantics. In the 10 process, we will show how a major theory of humor, the Semantic Script-based 11 Theory of Humor (Raskin 1979a, 1985; Attardo 1994) first evolved into the Gen- 12 eral Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo/Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994), and now into 13 the Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor (Raskin/Triezenberg 2005; Raskin 14 2009; Hempelmann 2009; Taylor 2009, 2010). 15 The last theory is a work in (rapid) progress, and the last section of the paper will 16 be devoted to a number of recent developments in blending the Ontological Se- 17 mantic Technology our team is developing for Natural Language Processing appli- 18 cations with the improved and revised humor theory. 19 Before we get there, however, we will discuss three major areas that are necessary 20 for understanding, especially by scholars outside of linguistic semantics, what we 21 22 have been doing and why. First, we will explain our understanding of theory, so that 23 it not be confused with a reader’s own interpretations and expectations and not lead, 24 again and again, to the most surprising readings of what our theory of humor has 25 done. Second, we will restate – for those yet unexposed to either of them – what 26 exactly the Semantic Script-based Theory of Humor and the General Theory of 27 Verbal Humor claim, what premises they use, what their goals are, and how 28 they justify and evaluate themselves. 29 In the last section of the paper on the Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor 30 we will address a number of important issues, often subverting and revising the 31 claims of its predecessors. The Semantic Script-based Theory of Humor claimed 32 that the list of script oppositions was an extra piece of knowledge that it had to use 33 along with regular semantic analysis, this making the Semantic Script-based Theo- 34 ry of Humor no longer a strict application of linguistic semantics to humor. We will 35 demonstrate how the list actually folds onto Ontological Semantic Theory, so this 36 disappears as an obstacle to the strict-application status of the Ontological Seman- 37 tic Theory of Humor. 38 Second, we will show that Ontological Semantic Theory offers a procedure for 39 discovering the main script opposition in a joke, an algorithm that the Semantic 40 Script-based Theory of Humor and General Theory of Verbal Humor described 41 rather rigorously for a competent linguist, but apparently incomprehensibly to 42 other, often enthusiastic adherents of the theories. Abstracts 399

1 We will also sketch out the contribution Ontological Semantic Theory can make 2 to the still controversial Logical Mechanism Knowledge Resource of the General 3 Theory of VerbalHumor. This will be an initial step, we hope, towards understand- 4 ing how jokes are put together and what exactly their internal/false logics are. 5 One side product of this paper is intended to be a better understanding by the 6 non-linguists and atheoretical linguists in the humor research community as well as 7 by any scholar interested in humor, what the linguists of humor do and what they 8 don’t, what they can deliver to these communities and what they cannot, and what 9 to expect from our work and what to do on their own rather than writing misdir- 10 ected, even if majorly entertaining, things about our work. We do not intend this 11 paper to kill off all the Hollywood-strength conspiracy theories, mostly of Euro- 12 pean vintage, of how a bunch of us have been trying to dominate humor research 13 and claim the firstborns from everybody else. We do apologize for trying to remove 14 the fun stuff from humor research: we realize we are acting as killjoys and killsports; 15 instead of joining the fun and games of discovering the subverting humanity and 16 inexhaustible complexity of humor, we boringly persist in discovering the truth 17 about how humor works. 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 308 Victor Raskin et al.

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How to cite this item:

Abstract of: Victor Raskin/Christian F. Hempelmann/Julia M. Taylor, How to Understand and Assess a Theory: The Evolution of the SSTH into the GTVH and Now into the OSTH. In: JLTonline (05.11.2010) Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-001272 Link: http://nbn -resolving.de/ urn:nbn:de:0222 -001272