VNU UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN HẢI HÀ

EXAMINING LINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY AS A
SOURCE OF CONSTRUCTING FUNNINESS
IN ENGLISH VERBAL JOKES

(KHẢO SÁT HIỆN TƯỢNG MƠ HỒ NGÔN NGỮ VỚI VAI TRÒ
LÀ MỘT NGUỒN TẠO NÊN TÍNH HÀI HƯỚC CỦA
CÁC CÂU CHUYỆN TẾU TIẾNG ANH)
M.A. COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15

EXAMINING LINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY AS A
SOURCE OF CONSTRUCTING FUNNINESS
IN ENGLISH VERBAL JOKES

(KHẢO SÁT HIỆN TƯỢNG MƠ HỒ NGÔN NGỮ VỚI VAI TRÒ
LÀ MỘT NGUỒN TẠO NÊN TÍNH HÀI HƯỚC CỦA
CÁC CÂU CHUYỆN TẾU TIẾNG ANH)
M.A. COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Võ Đại Quang HAnOi- 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

7
2.1.1. Linguistic semantics
7
2.1.2. Linguistic ambiguity
8
2.1.3. Types of linguistic ambiguity in English
9
2.2. English verbal jokes
11
2.2.1. The notion of Humor
11
2.2.2. What counts as “verbal jokes”?
12
2.2.2.1. Definitions of verbal jokes
12
2.2.2.2. Types of verbal jokes
14
2.2.2.3. Verbal jokes versus other types of humor
14
2.2.3. What makes a joke a joke?
18
2.2.3.1. The role of linguistic ambiguity in verbal jokes
18
2.2.3.2. Factors towards appreciating verbal jokes’
funniness
19
2.2.4. Social functions of verbal jokes
20
39
3.2.2.2. Structural confusion
40
3.2.3. Phonological ambiguity
42
3.2.4. Pragmatic ambiguity
45
3.2.4.1. Violating the maxim of Quantity
46
3.2.4.2. Violating the maxim of Quality
48
3.2.4.3. Violating the maxim of Manner
48
3.2.4.4. Violating the maxim of Relation
49
3.2.5. Other types of ambiguity
50
3.2.5.1. Mixed ambiguity
50
3.2.5.2. Idiom and complex language
52
3.3. Classification of English verbal jokes based on types of
53 ambiguity involved
3.3.1. Types of English verbal jokes based on linguistic
ambiguity
53
3.3.2. Frequency level of English verbal jokes based on
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ELT
English language teaching
ST
Source language
TL
Target language

LIST OF FIGURES AND CHARTS

FIGURES
PAGE Figure 1: Jakobson’s general model of communication
21
Figure 2: Types of ambiguity (adapted from Walton 1996)
25

The issue of verbal humor, along with its most common representative, verbal jokes,
has been the focus of various studies in philosophical, psychological, social logical and
cognitive linguistics fields. Unlike non-verbal humor, which is related to extralinguistic
features, verbal humor is perceived as that primarily constructed by means of language in
the form of a single-joke-carrying text (Raskin, 1985). As a product of language, verbal
humor is, undoubtedly, an exclusively human domain that no other creatures or entities can
possess. In his work on the theory of linguistic verbal jokes in English, Lew (1996) asserts
the fact that contrary to its abundant resources, humor in general is not equally available to
all humans in the way that it requires “sense of humor” and language competence to
appreciate its funniness, which apparently not everyone can possess, especially when the
hearers of the humor can acquire modestly the language of the humor.
Below is a very notable verbal joke:
(1) In the diner of a southbound train, a honeymoon couple notices two nuns at another
table. When neither could identify the religious habit, the husband volunteered to
settle the question.
“Pardon me, Sisters,” he said, pausing politely before the nuns‟ table, “but would
you mind telling me your Order?”
One of the nuns smiled at him. “Not at all,” she said cheerfully. “Lam chops- and
they‟re delicious!”
(Hoke, 1965:194)

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It is obvious that the funniness of the joke can only be revealed when two different text-
readings are accessed, one by the husband to refer to the religious rank of the nuns; and the
other by the two nuns to respond to the enquiry about their food selection. Clearly, it has
nothing to do with the lack of context in this piece of humor but it is more of the problems
of one word denoting two possible referents or antecedents in the context. To be more
specific, it is the noun “order” with its double meanings of “a group of people, especially
monks or nuns, living under religious rules” and “a request for food and drinks in a hotel,
restaurant, etc.” that causes the contradiction between the two responses, thus, creates the

This, to a large extent, can contribute to ruining the ambiguous and funny features of the
humorous texts. As warned by W.H. Auden, a famous English poet, the study of the humor
can threaten the humor to dead.
Stimulated by this recognition as well as personal interests, the researcher has
conducted the paper entitled “Examining linguistic ambiguity as a source of constructing
funniness in English verbal jokes”, with the view to exploring English verbal jokes in a
deeper sense, without damaging the humor nature of the jokes. In short, the paper places a
strong emphasis on analyzing how one particular type of linguistic ambiguity becomes the
humorous stimulus of various English joke-carrying texts, then, makes up one type of
linguistically ambiguous English verbal jokes.
The findings of the paper, hopefully, can bring about a closer look into the being
discussed matter together with a holistic picture of how a joke is ambiguously humorous.
Furthermore, with its merits and drawbacks, the study is expected to contribute a stronger
voice into the modest number of studies on the same field and be a helpful and sufficient
reference for future studies.
1.2. Objectives of the study
As mentioned clearly earlier, the current paper aims at tackling the existing
shortcomings of previous studies on the application of linguistic ambiguity in verbal jokes.
To be more specific, through extracting and linguistically analyzing 50 verbal-joke texts
collected for the paper in detail, some rules that govern humorous stimuli of linguistic
ambiguity-based English verbal jokes are expected to be captured, concurrently, some
categories and subcategories of English verbal jokes involving linguistic ambiguity can

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also be proposed. Additionally, the results of the paper can help to reveal an overall trend
about the frequency of each type of ambiguity-based English verbal jokes. In the final
place, from the analysis of the chosen joke texts, some implications for teaching and
learning the English language and for proper translation of those texts into Vietnamese can
be drawn.
These objectives, shortly speaking, can be elaborated into the following research

1.4. Significance of the study
In the first place, the study, once accomplished, is expected to be an informative,
useful and interesting source for both linguistic and non-linguistic readers. More
specifically, equipped by the outcomes of the paper, linguists and teachers of linguistics
can find another simple but effective aspect to deal with the matter of linguistic ambiguity,
a puzzle in semantic, structural and pragmatic fields. Similarly, students of English, with
the help of humorous examples and detailed explanations in the paper, can access similar
linguistically ambiguous texts and analyze those texts in an easy and motivating manner.
Secondly, with regards to social interaction purposes, the study hopefully can assist
readers, especially students of English and those whose language competence is modest to
confidently get involved in or even successfully initiate, maintain and close any
communicative event. Obviously, with more or less linguistic strategies related to humor,
social interactions can easily be established and reserved. Communication breakdowns and
culture shocks, consequently, can be minimized (Pepicello and Green, 1984).
Last but not least, will all attempts of the researcher at presenting the study in a
systematic, thorough and reader-friendly way, the paper would expectedly contribute to the
few studies on linguistic ambiguity as a source of English humor in general. Most
importantly, the findings of the paper may receive recognition from those interested and be
appreciated as a reliable and comprehensive reference in linguistic aspects, particularly in
ambiguity-related issues.
1.5. Structure of the thesis
The study is presented in four chapters. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction
to the topic as well as the stimuli for conducting the paper. In this chapter, objectives of the

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paper and research question are raised, followed by a summary of scope and significance
of the study. Implied by the title “Literature review”, chapter 2 deals with exploring the
theoretical notions of Linguistic ambiguity and English verbal jokes. Previous studies on
the ambiguity-based theories of English humor are also examined in this chapter. Chapter
3, also the focus of the entire paper, presents a full answer to the proposed research

Ambiguity are about to be the focus of denotation in this part of the paper.
2.1.1. Linguistic semantics
Dated back from nearly a century ago, the term Linguistic semantics has triggered a
hot debate on how it should be perceived and to what nature it is attached. With precious
contributions to the studies of linguistics, Frawley (1992:xiii, xiv) asserts that “Linguistic
semantics concerns the relation between semantic structure and overt linguistic form. More
technically, it is about grammaticalization patterns or how languages carve up and express
universal semantic space in grammatical form.” In a deeper sense, this eminent linguist
defines Linguistic semantics as “the study of literal meanings that are grammaticalized or
encoded.” (p.1) Viewing the issue from the same angle, Lyons (1995) additionally
emphasizes the ambiguity of the term Linguistic semantics in that it refers either to “the
study of meaning in so far as this is expressed in language” or “the study of meaning
within linguistics” (p.11). Jackendoff (1983), on the other hand, takes the view that
linguistic semantic can be defined as central to conceptual semantics. The term, for
Jackendoff, should primarily be concerned with the grammatical meaning and obviously
exclude the so-called lexical meaning in linguistics.
In its nature, Linguistic semantics is classified as a branch of linguistics just as
philosophical semantics of philosophy or logical semantics or logic, which are generally

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considered non-linguistic semantics. While it is normally easy to figure out the differences
in the focus of Linguistic semantics and its counterparts in other disciplines, only in
Frawley (1992) can Linguistic semantics be distinguished from its partner in the field of
linguistics, which is Philosophical semantics. According to Frawley (1992:4),
Philosophical semantics attempts to solve the problem “(a) whether and how meaning is at
all possible, and (b) the kinds of meanings that are in principle possible.” Primarily,
Philosophical semantics is deductive, which spins around the principle based on which the
meaning of the language arises. On the contrary, Linguistic semantics is an “empirical
discipline” (Frawley, 1992:5) which is inductive and concerns more of the actual meanings
that the language produces rather than following any model patterns.

Sentence (3a) does, clearly, not share the same meaning as sentence (3b) and vice versa as
they mention two different events. Therefore, they are not paraphrases of each other, which
then makes it linguistically reasonable to conclude that sentence (3) is ambiguous.
Let us note that ambiguity should and must be distinguished from vagueness. While
the former has several denotations (as can be seen through various examples in the paper),
the latter consists of ONE denotation which is indefinite. Consider the use of “red” in the
following sentence:
(4) Sarah has bought a red dress.
The underlined expression herein is vague as dark pink or dark orange can both denote the
color red of the sentence. It is obvious that vagueness has nothing to do with lack of
knowledge as we all know how the expression is and the sentence‟s truthvalue is neither
true nor false.
2.1.3. Types of linguistic ambiguity in English
Also in their linguistic works, Oaks (1994), Walton (1996) and Hurford and Heasley
(2001) clearly categorize ambiguity into two main strands, making up a well-built
framework for English language in terms of ambiguity, namely lexical ambiguity, which
results from the ambiguity of a word or any lexical constituents within the sentence, and
structural (or grammatical) ambiguity, in which the lexical items of a sentence are
realized to relate to each other in various ways, even though none of the individual items
are ambiguous. This can be well exemplified in sentence (5) below:

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(5) John lives near the bank.
Apparently, the word “bank” herein, due to its multiple meanings of either “an
organization or a place that provides a financial service” or “the land sloping up along each
side of a river or canal”, has created two separate interpretations of sentence (5) which,
consequently, is considered an ambiguous sentence. More specifically, sentence (5) is a
case of lexical ambiguity.
Another example of lexically ambiguous sentence can be found in (6):
(6) She can‟t bear the children.

2.2.1. The notion of Humor
Humor is mysterious (Lew, 1996), which has been the focus of a good number of
scholarly studies in the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology
and linguistics. While the other fields see humor as one and the same phenomenon,
linguists analyzing it potentially operate its semantic and sociolinguistic (or pragmatic)
mechanisms (Dynel, 2009).
Nevertheless, as found out by Keith-Spiegel (1972), when it comes to the field of
linguistics, humor has posed a difficulty in finding a theoretical definition in the most
general sense, thus, the argument that humor is undefinable has been advanced several
times (Escarpit, 1960). There are three possible reasons to account for this “hard nut”.
First, there has been no general agreement on how to give a full definition to this notion.
Second, humor research has such a long tradition that throughout periods of time, the
findings of previous papers are revised and refuted. Finally, as stated clearly earlier in this
paper, humor has attracted considerable interests from various disciplines, each of which
has applied a specific set of definition and methodologies of humor.

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From this recognition, this current paper has no ambition to propose any expectedly
more insightful definition of Humor but rather aims at exploring types of humorous
stimuli, in which “verbal jokes” is regarded as one set.
2.2.2. What counts as “verbal jokes”?
2.2.2.1. Definitions of verbal jokes
Of various humorous stimuli, linguists including Raskin (1985), Attardo and Raskin
(1991), Chiaro (1992), Attardo (1994), Norrick (1993), Lew (1996), Alexander (1997),
among many others, have paid much attention to verbal humor due to various means of
language or text that the humor exploits. However, the clearest and most tangible
representatives or prototypical forms that are used to measure verbal humor are verbal
jokes, orally produced in conversations or published in collections. Thus, talking about
verbal humor is, for most of the time, to mean verbal jokes rather than any other of its
manifestations (allusion, puns and the likes).

to build upon, or rather to be incongruous with. (cited in Lew, 1996:11)
On the ground of Incongruity theory, Raskin (1985) proposes his Script-based
Semantic Theory of Humor, claiming, “…a text can be characterized as a single-joke
carrying text if both of the conditions in (108) are satisfied.
(108) (i) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts
(ii) The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite in a special
sense […]” (p.99)
Herein, verbal jokes are seen from their different interpretations that two hearers of the
jokes may arrive at.
For the purposes of the current paper, Helzron‟s concise definition and Incongruity
theory by Keith-Spiegel (1972) appear to be the most suitable lodestar assuring that the
research process is scientifically approved.
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2.2.2.2. Types of verbal jokes
Attardo (1994) affirms in Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis that
the prominences of verbal jokes in particular and jokes in general are resulted from the fact
that they are distinctively short, popular in everyday talks, easy to collect and quite simple
as they seem to use only one source of humorous stimuli. Also in this outstanding piece of
work, Attardo categorizes any verbal-joke-carrying text into two subsets: canned (or
narrative) jokes and conversational jokes, which are distinguished from one another by the
level of contextual (and co-textual as well) support that the two types of text involve.
Specifically, canned jokes are said to be context-free in that whenever it comes to a
certain situation, it matters little which certain joke should be told. By contrast,
conversational jokes show up spontaneously in conversational events and are
comparatively context-bound. That is to say, canned jokes are available to be used
repeatedly in various contexts, while their counterpart is typically limited to the events that
they originate from.

4) Laughter can be observed overtly but for many times, it is simulated (Jefferson,
1985).
Puns
Puns or wordplay is considered by Ritchie (2004) as one of the simplest form of
jokes, which, in the most common sense, is associated with the sound of the word.
Consider the following example of puns:
(10) Why did the cookie cry?
Because its mother had been away for so long.
(Pepicello and Green, 1984:59)
For this specific pun, it matters very little in terms of humorous stimuli if the pun is not
read aloud. In its oral presentation of the text, the pun raises two conflicting strings

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between “away for” and “a wafer”, with the latter related more directly to the “cookie” in
the first line.
Other instances of this kind of joke can be found in:
(11) A gossip is someone with a great sense of rumor.
And (12) At a pizza shop: 7 days without pizza makes one weak.
In the two puns, it is the clever use of language (sense of humor vs. sense of rumor and 7
days one week vs. 7 days one weak) that makes the puns interesting.
A note-worthy point to make herein is proposed from recognition that while jokes
often bring about laughter, puns do not require themselves to be funny all the time.
Satire, irony and sarcasm
While puns and jokes can be appreciated in any situation, satire, irony and sarcasm
can only engender laughter if taken into specific contexts. That is to say, they are typically
context-bound.
Satire is most frequently used in literature, which, according to Blake (2007), “aims
to ridicule, to prick pretensions, to expose hypocrisy…Satire distorts and
exaggerates.”(p.16) To illustrate this point, the scholar gives an example from a TV show
about the armed conflict between USA and Iraq:

2.2.3. What makes a joke a joke?
2.2.3.1. The role of linguistic ambiguity in verbal jokes
Both Incongruity theory and Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor described in
previous section have accounted for the most apparent feature and humorous mechanism of
many verbal jokes: double meanings, which misleads the hearer, followed by the punch-
line (Nash, 1985).
Refer to jokes (1), (2) and (9) for a detailed analysis of their double meanings.

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This diversity of semantic interpretation actually takes on the form of linguistic
ambiguity. As Shultz and Horibe (1974) find out, “a thorough analysis of hundreds of
verbal jokes by the authors indicated that many of them depend on some sort of linguistic
ambiguity for a successful resolution” (p.13). Similarly, Paulos (1980:85) asserts: “a joke
can thus be considered a kind of structured ambiguity, the punch line precipitating the
catastrophe of switching interpretations.”
It should, perhaps, be noted not only that verbal jokes commonly exhibit linguistic
ambiguity but also that in a well-built joke, the clue signaling the realization of ambiguity
should coincide with the punch of the joke. However, the ambiguous string does not need
to be so placed. In fact, many cases have proved that this appears at an earlier point in the
text of the joke. Attardo (1994) reaches the conclusion when finding out 80% of his data
exhibit such a pattern.
2.2.3.2. Factors towards appreciating verbal jokes’ funniness
Ambiguity theories in verbal jokes also suggest the major reasons for not seeing a
joke as funny, which reckon that the joke recipients (readers or hearers), especially the
language learners, may not perceive the linguistic ambiguity involved in the joke as their
vocabulary and knowledge of interpretation are limited. Lew (1996) further comments on
this issue that “whether a given recipient evaluates a joke (or other stimulus) as funny, and
to what degree, depends on a wide range of factors, including the following: cultural and
ethnic identity, set of attitudes, identification with characters and subject, mode of delivery
of the stimulus, mood, sex, age, family traditions, situational setting, and most certainly a

c. Mode of delivery: referring to the types and forms of the joke, whether it is written
or spoken. Quality and tone of voice, pace and speed of speaking and intonation are
also considered governing factors. Nevertheless, they are all related to spoken
jokes, which need a detailed phonetic analysis, therefore, should be treated as out of
the scope of this paper. In addition, context of delivery is included in this type,
which states that when told in different places, in different situational settings, a
certain joke may receive different reactions.
d. Clever use of language: this factor in fact targets at the language ability of the joke
recipients, which asserts that the jokes‟ funniness can be appreciated only when the