The Basic Humor Process: A Cognitive-Shift Theory and the Case against Incongruity (Humor Research, No. 5) (Humor Research, No 5)

This treatise presents and defends a new theory of humour, one designed to cover all examples of all types and to provide the foundations for a full account of the global phenomenon. Incongruity theory and the new theory are contrary in the strict logical sense of the term. Hence a determined effort is made to demonstrate that incogruity theory in general, in all its forms, fails. Among the topics covered are: the anti-essentialist approach; the concept of a humour process and that of the basic humour process; the subjective character of humour; the laughter of humour, relaxation and pleasure; humour and organic evolution; elementary incongruity theory; incongruity-and-resolution theory; the fantasy element in humour and "funny incongruity"; the notion of "local logic" in humour; the precise locus of the mystery of humour; the remarkable appeal of incongruity theory; psychological experiments in incongruity theory; Kant's and Koestler's theories of humour; and the current state of research into the basic humour process

This collection of recent papers in Laboratory Phonology approaches phonological theory from several different empirical directions. Psycholinguistic research into the perception and production of speech has produced results that challenge current conceptions about phonological structure. Field work studies provide fresh insights into the structure of phonological features, and the phonology-phonetics interface is investigated in phonetic research involving both segments and prosody, while the role of underspecification is put to the test in automatic speech recognition.

Pt. 1. Preliminaries -- pt. 2. Theory L and reason to conclude it is true -- pt. 3. Incongruity theory and reason to conclude it is unsound -- pt. 4. Further development.