Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, 2007. / Lacks separate title page and contents. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / "Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries, Chicago, Illinois, 1920." Includes bibliographical references (p. [47]).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1919. / "Private edition, distributed by the University of Chicago libraries, Chicago, Illinois, 1920." Includes bibliographical references (p. [47]).

This thesis describes a formal model of a subtype of humour, and the implementation of that model in a program that generates jokes of that subtype. Although there is a great deal of literature on humour in general, very little formal work has been done on puns, and none has been implemented. All current linguistic theories of humour are over-general and not falsifiable. Our model, which is specific, formal, implemented and evaluated, makes a significant contribution to the field. Punning riddles are our chosen subtype of verbal humour, for several reasons. They are very common, they exhibit certain regular structures and mechanisms, and they have been studied previously by linguists. Our model is based on our extensive analysis of large numbers of punning riddles, taken from children's joke books. The implementation of the model, JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine), generates punning riddles, from a humour independent lexicon. Pun generation requires much less world knowledge than pun comprehension, making it feasible for implementation. To support our claim that all of JAPE's output is punning riddles, we conducted an evaluatory experiment. We took JAPE texts, human-generated texts, nonsense non-jokes and sensible non-jokes, and asked joke experts to evaluate them. For joke experts, we used 8-11 year old children, since psychological research suggests that this age group enjoys, and can recognize, punning riddles better than other age groups. The results showed that JAPE's output texts are, in fact, recognizably jokes. The evaluation showed that our model adequately describes a significant subtype of verbal humour. We believe that this model can now be expanded to cover puns in general, as well as other types of linguistic humour.

Inaug.-diss--Halle. / Vita. List of dramas: p. 5-6.

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, 2007. / Lacks separate title page and contents. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68).

Inaug.-diss--Halle. / Vita. List of dramas: p. 5-6.

In the linguistic study of humor, research has largely been centered around the formulation of models and theories or the dissecting and categorization of jokes. Because of the often difficult-to-categorize aspects of verbal jokes, much time has been spent trying to create taxonomies for humor types and mechanisms. Linguists such as Raskin and Attardo have sought to categorize all verbal humor according to various functional elements (Attardo & Raskin, 1991). Such elements include, but are not limited to, the logical mechanism that drives the humor in the joke or the situation where the joke takes place. These categorizations are helpful in understanding the potential components of a given joke. However, relatively few studies have sought to quantify and qualify the distribution of these components across real-world data. This study seeks to understand the distribution of some of these categorizations laid out by Raskin and Attardo across joke topics, namely pun wordplay and narrative strategy. To do this, an original 100,000 word joke corpus was designed and compiled consisting of four joke topics: Marriage, Politics, Animals, and Food. Through some manual sorting and Python programming, jokes were labeled according to wordplay strategy and narrative structure. A subsequent statistical analysis was carried out to determine whether there exists a pattern of specific joke strategies when dealing with children's humor versus adult humor.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

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