ABSTRACT
When I first conceptualized the idea of a Handbook of Language and Humor, I found that it was relatively straightforward to make a list of the chapters I would have wanted in such a volume. Some of them were obvious: how could a handbook of language and humor not have a chapter on puns, or irony, or laughter, for example? Other chapters were needed for historical coverage: one would not have a serious coverage of the history of the field without a chapter on Raskin’s Semantic-Script Theory, or on the isotopy-based European models. Furthermore, once one starts considering the subfields of linguistics, it becomes obvious one needs a conversation analysis chapter, a variationist chapter, a psycholinguistic chapter, a neurolinguistic chapter, a translation chapter, etc. Other chapters were motivated by advances in the field: computational linguistic treatments of humor have undergone a renaissance, as have cognitive linguistic ones, and, at long last, Relevance-theoretic ones. In a few cases, I exercised editorial judgment, for example, decreeing that a new subfield of Internet and online humor had acquired enough significance to deserve a chapter, as have the field of failed humor, the field of the markers of humor (two chapters: one on humor markers and the more narrowly focused chapter on prosody and humor), and the burgeoning field of politeness and humor (a chapter of its own and a significant discussion in the stylistics chapter). Finally, I wanted to ensure fairly even coverage of the various subfields, which is why we have three chapters in discourse-based humor: conversation analysis, discourse-analysis, and corpus-based or corpus-informed analysis, and two chapters on translation, probably the most frequent linguistically related phenomenon applied to humor.
