Epistasis analysis of ΔpnpA mutants

Building on the discussions so far, we can outline a way of working towards a comprehensive description of verbally expressed humour. The approach starts by describing particular classes of jokes, at a level of detail that should reveal pertinent factors within the linguistic structure of the jokes.

The aim is that the humour analyst should set out the crucial aspects of the joke class, using whatever linguistic concepts (phonetic, syntactic, semantic, etc.) are needed (see Section 3.9 and Appendix A.1). Such an analysis does not in itself explain the ‘funniness’ of the jokes; that is the task of an eventual full theory of humour, which would state what it is about the joke-class definitions that renders them humorous. That is, the statement of the essential attributes of the joke class will display certain relationships between elements of the jokes (e.g. the meanings and sounds of its parts). A (future) theory of VEH would then indicate, at a suitable level of abstraction, whether (or why) these relationships amount to humour or not. In this way, a theory of VEH does not itself have to itemize low-level details of how jokes are constructed. The important characteristics of the humorous texts are summarized by the joke-class definitions, and the humour theory then adjudicates upon these more abstract definitions.

This is comparable to the distinction, in linguistics, between a grammat-ical description of a language (which says which structures are well formed) and a universal theory of grammar (which explains why grammars have to take certain forms).

In an earlier version (Ritchie 2000) we proposed a notation for writing succinct structural descriptions of jokes, but that attempt at formalization was premature. We do not yet know exactly what the components of a joke-description should be (see Chapter 12).

The central idea in providing a formal definition of a class of jokes is that the analyst must specify what abstract objects are involved, what types of objects these are (e.g. meanings, word-strings), what properties these objects have and what relations there are between them. That is, the aim is simply to say what is present, at some suitable level of detail. To do this, we shall have to posit certain abstract concepts as primitive elements in our descrip-tion. These may be relatively simple (e.g. phonetic segments roughly corresponding to phonemes) or extremely complex (e.g. contexts in which a joke may be uttered). (See Section 3.9 and Appendix A.1 for some proposed basic concepts.) If the joke-class definitions are to be connected to the data, or are to support theorizing in the manner intended, the primitives must take on more meaning at some stage. There are broadly two ways in which they could do this, relative to a theory of humour:

theory-external and theory-internal. A primitive is given a theory-external defi-nition when some other theoretical system provides the details. For example, for some basic concepts (e.g. phonetic segments, syntactic structures) 1

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linguistic theory could be expected to supply definitions. A theory-internal definition is needed where the humorous effect of a text will depend on the exact definition of the primitive in a way which could not be predicted by any theory from another discipline (e.g. linguistics, psychology). For example, the SSTH (Chapter 6) proposes that a form of conflict between meanings leads to humour, but that only certain types of conflict are funny;

this is an example of a theory-internal definition.

This means that a joke-class definition shows explicitly only some of the factors that make texts humorous. The remaining factors (which may be highly significant) are embodied in the theory-internal definitions of some of the concepts employed. In our analyses, we shall not attempt to give precise, detailed or formal definitions of all our primitives. For those where a theory-external definition is appropriate, we shall assume this can be given; for the more substantive primitives (from a humour viewpoint), this task is left for further research. In this way, establishing a set of primitives suitable for describing jokes also decomposes the task (of explaining humour) into subsidiary problems, namely, providing the theory-internal definitions. In this sense, those primitives are only provisionally ‘primitive’;

in the longer term, humour theory should render them non-primitive by offering full and precise definitions. Even where theory-internal definitions are needed, the hope would be that at some stage the humorous concepts would be related to notions outside humour theory, maybe after several levels of intermediate definitions. If this were not the case, if our central concepts were all completely defined within the theory of humour, we would have given a more detailed description of the humour mechanisms, but we would not have explained the humorous effect. Explanation is achieved when a phenomenon is systematically described in terms of other independently given concepts.

The framework advocated here is not a theory of verbally expressed humour. It does not lay down principles for what is or is not humorous.

Instead, it is a methodological approach which is intended to push forward the search for a theory of VEH, by describing the data more precisely and at an interesting level of abstraction. However, it is virtually impos-sible for a statement or proposal to be completely free of theoretical content, whether deliberate or unintended. Even a very general suggestion for how to tackle the problem, as here, makes certain implicit assumptions which constitute at least minimal empirical claims.

Many of the working assumptions for the descriptive methodology advo-cated here will be summarized in Section 3.9. They involve, for example, the existence of texts that can be segmented into subparts, and of mean-ings which are associated with texts. To that extent, the approach makes some very sketchy claims about humorous texts, but many of these assump-tions would be shared by much research into VEH; hence, they are not highly controversial. (Of course, this is different from being correct.) 11

It is also important to acknowledge that the joke-class definitions we will offer in later chapters are still very vague. They are no more than first attempts to sketch the relevant factors in the various jokes, in a way which is slightly more precise than past practice, and which could be devel-oped further in detail and precision.

What we will have, if this approach is followed, is a provisional or preliminary descriptive theory of jokes, built upwards from the data, but not yet claiming to cover all classes of VEH (let alone all humour). If it does not cover all humour, then it cannot claim to present necessary and sufficient ingredients for humour. However, within the proto-theory there would be descriptions of (sub)classes of joke, and each such description might well (ideally, should) define necessary and sufficient conditions for membership of that subclass. The overall proto-theory would then state a sufficient but not necessary condition for being a joke, namely that a text fall into one of these defined classes. That is, the provisional theory would be of the logical form:

T is a joke if P₁(T ) or P₂(T ) . . . or P_n(T ) where each P_iis the definition of one class of joke.

Within each subclass, the restricted local theory would be relatively detailed, and so would allow falsifiable predictions (within that limited class of jokes). Hence by surrendering, at least for the moment, the claim of universality, we can gain some of the benefits of a detailed and relatively formal theory, albeit on a small range of data. In principle, if we were sure that the set {P₁, P₂. . . , P_n} was complete, then the ‘if ’ in the above statement could be strengthened to ‘if and only if ’, but that stage is a long way off.

This could be a manageable way to tackle the enormous problem of creating a theory of the whole of VEH, and it is the framework which we shall be following here.

It might appear that what is being proposed here is yet another taxonomy, redundantly piled upon the many classifications offered in the literature (Attardo (1994) reviews several). Our approach should differ from most existing taxonomies in the following ways:

• rather than just grouping jokes into labelled classes, we shall provide definitions of the joke classes in terms of what we propose as their internal mechanisms;

• these definitions will, as far as possible, be given at a level of formality which most earlier analyses have lacked;

• a clear interface with conventional theoretical notions from linguistics and logic will be specified, so that the relation to mainstream language theories is clearer.

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Our aims differ from some researchers who are adamantly not interested in theory:

. . . the following chapters . . . do not presume to present a ‘theory’

of English verbal humour. It is the author’s deeply felt conviction that in no possible sense whatsoever of the term is such a ‘theory’ either desirable or attainable.

(Alexander 1997: 18) The anti-theory approach is also exemplified by the completely analysis-free presentation in Redfern (1984), as Raskin (1987) makes very clear.

We are definitely not of that persuasion. Detailed description and analysis are not ends in themselves, but offer a route to a more adequate theory of jokes, and thence of humour.

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