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Grammar Thesaurus. Word Lists. Choose your language. My word lists. Tell us about this example sentence:. The word in the example sentence does not match the entry word. There is a sign that says, slow… children. My wife is fed up of my wordplay jokes. I made a chicken salad last night.
Apparently they prefer to eat grain. I went to the game and saw a Mexican wave , so I waved back at him. Dynel goes a step further, suggesting that:. The fact that the ambiguity is also structural can in fact also account for the rarity of examples, as they can be more difficult to come up with. The type of commonness to be found in the next two examples could be linked to the presence of conventional implicatures:.
You know that look you get from women when they want you? Nah, me neither. A child of 5 would know this. Bring me a child of 5!
Groucho Marx. The illocutionary level is ignored:. Which is perfect for her , because not only is she vegetarian… Jimmy Carr. Some interpretations are also based on reference problems, rather than meaning.
The following example may seem to be another instance of lexical ambiguity, but in fact, the word is taken to refer to distinct realities. What is at stake is reference rather than meaning, and the possibility of referring to different things in turn creates a form of interpretative ambiguity:.
A Chinese couple are in bed. My wife has just left me for Arnold Schwarzenegger. African child dies? And that, Romeo , is why we usually try to take a pulse first. Chaos: what erupts when he-who-lives-in-a-glass-house invites he-who-is-without-a-sin for dinner.
This makes some of them close r to the next types of examples. I was thinking of writing a book, A Guide to Better Shoplifting— but who the hell is going to buy it? Which was ironic because we were at the bus stop at the time. People call me Mr Compromise. I parked my car sideways over two disabled spaces.
Insert your own punchline here. This form of observational humour is typically found in stand-up comedy routines, although for practical reasons we have also drawn these examples from our book collections:. The strangeness of a situation can just be emphasized; some silly one-liners may remain surprising, or absurd:.
Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Chan-Chu. They could be considered to constitute sub-genres because of their recurrent characteristics and they form patterns writers have to embrace and play with.
Here are a few examples. Yo-mamma jokes: generally in the form Your mum is so X that Y , they are a form of ritualized insult originally linked to the African-American community in the U.
This is followed by a comeback, or by something that, as in the mental disease examples, confirms the presence of what the girlfriend reproached the man with in the first place. They emulate dictionary definitions but are either silly cf. This is a famous template for jokes in the English-speaking world which may sometimes also be used in one-liners:. Two dragons walk into a bar. Another well-known type of jokes is the stupid blonde joke, which may also be found in one-liners, although they also tend to be longer jokes.
Here is just one example amongst many:. I cheated on my blonde girlfriend and she found out. Which made her unsure if the baby was hers. Although examples 16 - 20 form recurrent templates, the characteristics found in these one-liners can still be linked to other cases, as shown earlier, but the fact that they constitute semi- fixed forms can be included in the forthcoming discussion in Section 3, in particular. The headings provided in the left column are an indication of possible groupings for the devices mentioned in the right column, but it should be noted, again, that they may not constitute entirely separate categories, or tiers.
The set forms of jokes are visually separated from the others because they can be thought to operate at a different level; this is briefly taken up in the discussion Section 3. Table 1. A summary of the types of one-liners presented in section 1 in relation to the main devices used. What we will try to show is what one-liners can bring to the discussion; the combination of some of the factors we are about to examine is, in particular, part of the problem.
Let us therefore try and see what one-liners have to say about re interpretation processes, and contextual meaning. This could perhaps for instance be said of examples 1 - 4 , 5 - 6 , 7 , 8 - 11 , and perhaps The case of examples 13 - 15 can be brought into question, although they, in fact, might not be the best counter-examples, as we shall see below.
Is this analysis correct? It seems necessary to go into some detail and name some of the parameters at stake. Dynel 7. It could be supposed, then, that the following pattern is the norm and constitutes the basic form for one-liners:. A well-known example of such sentences is The horse raced past the barn fell , which is not humorous. Even in 1a , the insect -butterfly is supposed to have been won at a swimming competition: in other words, the swimming is part of the content of the situation in which butterfly is intended to mean insect; the cancellation, if it exists, is incomplete.
In many cases, interpretations i. This is the case of examples 1b, c, d, … :. In 1h , the fact that glasses is made to mean drinking glasses does not mean that glasses can no longer be thought of as being spectacles as well; but a meaning that was not, for lack of a better word, salient, is now made to be available. In other words, part of the pleasure might come from the fact that the meaning is enriched and unstable and multiple, and not, or not necessarily, that there is one, and then another way of understanding it.
Dynel has rightly pointed out that one given mechanism has been thought to be more systematically present than is really the case. But are they discrete and separate? Where it happens might not necessarily prove central to distinguish whether the mechanism itself is perhaps partly the same. But do we actually have logically organized, self-contained areas which we refuse to combine? We may sometimes seek representations of this kind when constructing theoretical models, but doubt whether these models truly correspond to natural representations of the world.
All in all, all of this supposes that meanings are discrete, automatically? Good for the planet, but scratchy. I told her I go to the cinema and play football with my brother. Which has confused a lot of guys that have tried to start fights with me. Taylor But on the plus side — only three more sleeps till Christmas. What a sad state of affairs. I want to get the answers right but I really want to win the glasses. She was a vegan and refused to touch me. I was the only thing between H and JK.
Just hope I can pull it off. But some of us are short. Log In. Contact us Sign up for newsletters. Log In Register now My account. By Group Reporter. Smarter Living. Become the sitcom hero you've always wanted to be. By Bob Larkin July 8, Read This Next. Latest News. This one strange symptom could predict your risk.
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