This book explores some of the developments in Stylistics since its pioneer, Roman Jakobson, identified the patterning of the message as the poetic function. It analyses in turn Golding's Pincher Martin, Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Housman's A Shropshire Lad, Elizabeth Jennings' poem 'One Flesh', Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and a range of poems by John Donne. The analyses show how Jakobson's emphasis on the message gives way to emphasis on the code or on undermining the code (in the Golding and Donne chapters), on the context...

How are humorous meanings generated and interpreted? Understanding a joke involves knowledge of the language code (a matter mostly of semantics) and background knowledge necessary for making the inferences to get the joke (a matter of pragmatics). This book introduces and critiques a wide range of semantic and pragmatic theories in relation to humour, such as systemic functional linguistics, speech acts, politeness and relevance theory, emphasising not only conceptual but also interpersonal and textual meanings. Exploiting recent corpus-based research, it suggests that much humour can be...