Co-operation in humour and jokes. An analysis and comparison of humour with reference to Salvatore Attardo and Andrew Goatly

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Technical University of Braunschweig, language: English, abstract: This term paper will deal with the violation of maxims in the section of humour, mainly analysing the article ¿Violation of conversational maxims and cooperation: The case of jokes¿ by Salvatore Attardo (1993) and Andrew Goatly's (2012) chapter ¿Pragmatics: co-operation and politeness¿ in ¿Meaning and Humor¿.

Before analysing the article ¿Violation of conversational maxims and cooperation: The case of jokes¿ by Salvatore Attardo and Andrew Goatly's ¿Meaning and Humor¿, we have to focus on Paul Grice's cooperative principle (CP). Grice presented the CP in 1967 and his idea was that hearer (H) and speaker (S) have to speak cooperatively and accept each other to be able to understand each other. It describes how functional communication is achieved in a conversation. In Grice's opinion, society can only function communication if it is oriented towards co-operation. He suggests that there is a way of speaking which we all accept as a kind of standard behaviour and that conversation and social interaction ¿is guided by the co-operative principle (CP)¿ (Goatly 2012, 225), which states ¿Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.¿ (Grice 1975, 41-58).