VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
NGUYÊ
̃
N THI
̣
KIM PHƯƠNG
AN INVESTIGATION INTO SOME TYPICAL
LINGUISTIC FACTORS CAUSING LAUGHTER IN
BRITISH FUNNY STORIES

Nghiên cứu về những yếu tố ngôn ngữ gây cười điển
hình trong một số truyện cười nước Anh M.A Minor Programme Thesis

Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60.22.15


Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60.22.15
Supervisor: Associate Professor V Đi Quang, Ph.D.
HA NOI - 2012
i

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I: INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale 1
2. Aims of the study 1
3. Objectives of the study 1
4. Scope of the study: 2
5. Design of the study 2
PART II: DEVELOPMENT 4
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 4
1.1. Theoretical background: 4
1.1.1. Humor 4
1.1.2. British humor 5
1.1.3. Funny stories and Jokes 5
1.1.4. Pun 6
1.1.5. Ambiguity 6
1.1.6. Lexical ambiguity 7
1.1.6.1. Polysemy 8

3.3 Summary: 34
PART III: CONCLUSION 36
1. Recapitulation 36
2. Concluding remarks 36
3. Limitations 37
4. Suggestions for further study 37
REFERENCES 39
APPENDIX I
1

PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale
Peoples from all over the world, with different cultures and lifestyles, seem to have
one thing in common – sense of humor. There are a great amount of funny stories
from culture to culture. Each culture has its own typical joke-making characteristics.
Reading funny stories helps people relax with great efficiency. The way Vietnamese
learners read and understand Vietnamese jokes is not quite similar to the way English
people do. English learners may have some difficulties in reading between the lines in
some funny stories if they don‟t have the needed cultural and linguistic background.
In my opinion, a research into linguistic factor causing laughter in British funny
stories will bring about benefits to readers and pedagogical implications for teaching
and translation. And, this is the rationale for my study.
2. Aims of the study
The purposes of the research are as follows:

 To help English learners have a clear understanding of linguistic
features available in English funny stories or jokes
 To help English learners discover an interesting part of English besides
complicated grammar points or long complex reading passages
 To help English learners communicate more successfully with native

brief theoretical background with such concepts and conceptions as Humor, British
humour, Funny stories and jokes, Punning, Ambiguity, Lexical ambiguity,
Grammatical ambiguity.

3

Chapter 2, Methodology, describes the research-governing principles, data collection
instruments and data analysis procedure.

Chapter 3, Analysis and Discussions, offers a detailed analysis of the data, the results
obtained and discussions of these results.

Part 3: Conclusion. This is the last part of the thesis which provides a recapitulation
of the main points presented, concluding remarks on the research objectives,
limitations, and suggestions for further studies.

emotional response to fear or embarrassment. Therefore, humor cannot be defined
simply as something that makes you laugh. The response to humor is important in the
5

definition of something as humorous, but there are aspects and details to humor and
laughter which are sometimes overlooked.
1.1.2. British humor
The British have a unique sense of humour. Of all the characteristics which the
English are known all over the world, the sense of humour is one of the best-known
and most positively regarded. In England, you may consider humour a way of getting
along in society. Britain is the only country in the world which is inordinately proud
of its sense of humour. In other countries, if they find you inadequate or they hate
you, they will call you stupid, ill-mannered. In Britain, they will say that you have no
sense of humour. This is the final condemnation, the total dismissal.
1.1.3. Funny stories and Jokes
Funny stories are the stories that are told to make people laugh (Oxford
Advanced Learner‟s Dictionary). It is characterized by humorous phenomena. There
are two theories for what people find humorous, incongruity theory, superiority
theory. The most popular theory of why we find jokes funny revolves around the
concept of „incongruity‟. The idea is that we laugh at things that surprise us because
they seem out of place. It‟s funny when clowns wear outrageously large shoes, people
have especially big noses or politicians tell the truth. In the same way, many jokes are
funny because they involve ideas that run against our expectations. “A bear walks into
a bar. Animals talk.” And so on. But there is more to this theory than such simple
forms of incongruity. In many jokes, there is an apparent incongruity between the set-
up and the punch line. Scientists refer to this as the „incongruity-resolution‟ theory.
We resolve the incongruity caused by the punch line, and the accompanying feeling of
sudden surprise makes us laugh.
The superiority theory also explains why we laugh at certain types of jokes. Many
jokes make us feel superior to other people. In these types of jokes, people appear

apparent), whereas with information that is vague it is difficult to form any
7

interpretation at the desired level of specificity. Ambiguity describes the linguistic
phenomenon whereby expressions are potentially understood in two or more ways: an
ambiguous expression has more than one interpretation in its context.
There are two types of ambiguity: grammatical and lexical ambiguity. Lexical and
structural ambiguity is frequent enough to present a substantial challenge to natural
language processing. The fact that ambiguity occurs on so many linguistic levels in
language especially in jokes or funny stories make it difficult for English learners
understand the humour. Studies on the linguistic causes of ambiguity are perhaps is
really helpful in the field of humor research.
1.1.6. Lexical ambiguity
According to Fromkin et al (1983, p. 207), lexical ambiguity is created by a word
which can be understood in more than one way. For example, the sentence:
“She cannot bear children”
may be understood to mean either “She cannot tolerate children” or “She is unable to
give birth to children”. It is the word „bear‟ with one form and two different meanings
that gives rise to the lexical ambiguity in the sentence.
Similarly, this lexical ambiguity is traditionally illustrated with the word „bank‟ which
may mean either as “a business establishment in which money is kept for saving or
commercial purposes or is invested, supplied for loans, or exchanged” or “the slope of
land adjoining a body of water, especially adjoining a river, lake, or channel”. The
sentences:
I went to the bank.
We finally reached the bank.
I was on my way to the bank
contain the ambiguous word „bank‟, thus they are lexically ambiguous.
8


There are two kinds of partial homonyms.
Homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in
meaning. The words may be spelt the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense
of "rise"), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too.
Homophones that are spelt the same are also both homographs and homonyms.
Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs. The term
"homophone" may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, such as phrases,
letters or groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or
group of letters.
Grammatically equivalent homophones may cause ambiguity in spoken English, as is
exemplified in the utterance:
My brother likes sweets/ suites.
It is lexically ambiguous because sweets and suites are the plural forms of the two
different words „sweet‟ and „suite‟, respectively. These forms have the same
pronunciation /swi:ts/ but different meanings: „sweet‟ meaning “a small piece of
sweet food made of sugar or chocolate, etc.” and „suite‟ meaning “a set of matching
furniture for a room”. They are homophones and nouns.
This level of language provides the great sources of puns in English that can spawn a
number of lexical ambiguities and misunderstanding for listeners. Usually, the
speaker intentionally uses homophonic factors to cause difficulties for listeners at first
and then make them bend their minds to think further of the joke to discover what it
really means based on phonologically induced ambiguity. Homophone is widely used
in English joke.
10

Homographs (those identical in spelling only) - may also give rise to lexical
ambiguity in case they have the same lexical categories.
Grammatically equivalent homographs, meanwhile, may bring about the ambiguity in
written English. An example to illustrate is the word „leads‟ in:
They provided those leads.

It is obvious that whether the meaning of words are related or unrelated, the multiple
meanings of words often give rise to lexical ambiguity. The sentence:
“The bachelor finally died.”
is lexically ambiguous due to the multiple meanings of „bachelor‟ including (a) “a
man who has never married”, (b) “a young knight serving under the banner of
another”, (c) “someone with a first degree”, and (d) “a young male unmated fur seal
during the mating season”.
1.1.6.4. Transference of meaning:
A word may have both a “literal” meaning and one or more “transferred” meaning,
which is the cause of the multiplicity of meaning or a polysemous word; the result is
thus lexical ambiguity.
Metonymy:
One kind of transference of meaning is metonymy, the transference of meaning from
one object to another based on the association of contiguity of notions, i.e. instead of
the name of one object or notion, we use the name of another because these objects
are associated and closely related: „The kettle boils‟ instead of „The water in the kettle
boils‟, „crown‟ instead of „monarchy‟.
12

According to Nguyen Hoa (2004, p. 113), the main different cases of metonymy are:
the name of container used instead of the thing container, e.g., „to drink a glass‟;
names of past of human body used as symbols, e.g., „to have a good eye‟, „kind
heart‟; the concrete used instead of abstract, e.g., „from the cradle to the grave‟; the
material used for the things made of it, e.g., „canvass‟, „glass‟; the name of authors
instead of their works, e.g., „Shakespeare‟, „Picasso‟; and the part instead of the whole
and vice versa, e.g., „roof‟ for „house‟ or „bike‟ for the part of a bike in „to repair a
bike‟.
Metaphor:
Another basic kind of transference of meaning is metaphor, the transference from one
object to another based on the association of similarity between these two objects, i.e.,

the branch of linguistics that deal with words, their internal structure, and how they
are formed.
This kind of pun requires the speakers to have wide knowledge of vocabulary to use it
precisely and artistically. Playing on the morphological properties of words is rather
interesting because in some utterances there are many words used nearly the same but
they are obviously different in meanings.
1.1.7.2. Syntax
Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from
the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence
structure implied thereby. When a reader can reasonably interpret the same sentence
as having more than one possible structure, the text is equivocal and meets the
definition of syntactic ambiguity.
When a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way, it is grammatically
ambiguous, as exemplified in the following sentence (Hurford & Heasley, 1983, p.
121):
14

“Visiting relatives can be boring” which can be interpreted in two ways:
It can be boring to visit relatives.
Relatives who are visiting can be boring.
1.2. Previous works
Regarding the linguistic theories of humor, several previous studies have been
conducted in the linguistic study of humor (Raskin, 1985; Chiaro, 1992; Ross, 1998).
These theorists mainly focus on how the humor is achieved by the use of language.
In the light of the Cooperative Principles proposed by Grice (1975), Raskin (1985)
proposes the non-bona-fide mode of joke-telling:
(i) Maxim of Quantity: give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke;
(ii) Maxim of Quality: say only what is compatible with the world of the joke;
(iii) Maxim of Relation: say only what is relevant to the joke.
(iv) Maxim of Manner: tell the joke efficiently.

word system of a language. In addition to phonology, the lexicon, or vocabulary, is
also a source of puns. Finally, in terms of the syntactic structure, meaning is produced
by the way of how words, phases, and clauses are arranged. In order to understand the
syntactic ambiguities, EFL learners have to undertake a systematic level of analysis.
As a result, they are led to develop an awareness of syntactic function and get the
possible interpretations of sentence structures.
These previous studies provide general background knowledge to deal with this
problem. The examples above prove that lexical ambiguity is a complicated problem
to cope with, especially for English learners, whose vocabulary and knowledge of
interpretation is limited. Ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon in language which
occurs at all levels of linguistic analysis. Resolving the ambiguity necessarily
designates one specific lexical entry, which, in turn, automatically disambiguates the
semantic representation (and vice versa).
16

1.3. Summary:
This chapter has briefly reviewed theory of funny stories/ jokes and some linguistic
issues which cause laughter in funny stories. They are Ambiguity, Lexical Ambiguity
and Grammatical Ambiguity. In each of these theories, the author has pointed out
some details and sample analyses. In short, this chapter serves as the theoretical
foundation for the study.
The following chapters are spared for the presentation of the methodology, the
analysis, findings established and discussions and some implications regarding
humour creating features in British funny stories.

Grammatical ambiguity
However, it is such a hard job to know whether the story is originally British or not
because funny stories are universal. Therefore, carefulness is a must in the selection
of the stories for investigation.
18

Data authenticity
To ensure the reliability of the research, the stories selected are of British origin and
from reliable sources such as books, websites, articles, newspapers…so they will have
different ways of creating humour and also ensure the authenticity of the study.
Data sources
In order to answer the research questions already stated in the very first part, the
number of 33 jokes/ funny stories is collected. As for the source, all the stories are
collected from books, websites and other materials.
+ As for books, books about funny stories are collected and studied. They are a
valuable source to gather essential information for the thesis.
Main material is: Truyện tiếu lâm Anh, Nhà Xuất Bản Thanh Hóa
+ As for websites, they are the tool that is made use of. The websites are a huge
source of funny stories.
Three basic websites are:
http://books.google.com.vn/books?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/62132948/The-Linguistic-Analysis-of-Jokes

http://thejokes.co.uk/british-humour.php

+ As for other materials, namely the previous theses in linguistics which are
involved in the content of the study are also collected to grab related information.
Article: Ambiguity as a Device in British Humour
2.2. Research methods

samples taken from the stories collected.
20

Data categorizing: Funny stories that are collected from websites and books
mentioned above are categorized into different groups with different linguistic
features that cause laughter.
Data describing: With different groups of funny stories classified, description of
their typical linguistic features causing laughter is herein provided.
After using quantification and classification to identify the linguistic factors that cause
laughter into different categories, we can base on the result of the classification to
make some conclusions in the study.

2.3. Summary:
To sum up, the major method employed in this study is a qualitative one. The
procedure for the qualitative data analysis in this study is:
+ Collecting data which are British funny stories which are linguistically ambiguous.
+ Basing on the data collected, we classify the samples into categories in terms of
linguistic aspects.
+ By analyzing the funny stories in each category, we point out typical linguistic
factors causing laughter, predict the difficulties that Vietnamese learners have to deal
with and point out some implications.

(2) That doesn‟t matter
Customer: I would like a book, please!