ABSTRACT
The early ideas of the isotopy disjunction model (IDM) originated in Europe in the 1960s in the work of Algirdas Julien Greimas, a semiotician of structuralist orientation. His theory of the narrative and the concept of isotopy inspired and influenced many scholars in structural semantics. Greimas (1966) is credited with proposing the foundations of the model when he described the structure of jokes in his book Semantique structurale. Greimas identifies two necessary parts in jokes: the narration/presentation and the dialogue. The narration/presentation part sets the background and establishes the first isotopy (sense) of the text. The dialogue part dramatizes the story causing a second isotopy to arise and oppose the first one. Finally the two isotopies, which are in collision with one another, are linked together by a connecting term. Greimas’s observations on jokes attracted the attention of several scholars interested in humor, mostly in Europe. The first to be directly inspired by Greimas was Morin (1966, p. 108). She adopted Greimas’s model but introduced the original idea of analyzing the texts of jokes in terms of three functions. Morin redefined Greimas’s two-part subdivision of the text into a three-part division: normalization, interlocking, and disjunction.
