The phenomena described range from conversational humour, canned jokes and wordplay to humour in translation and news satire. The individual studies draw their material for analysis from traditional print and broadcast media, such as magazines, sitcoms, films and spoof news, as well as electronic and internet-based media, such as emails, listserv messages, live blogs and online news.
The volume will be of primary interest to a wide range of researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, intercultural studies, pragmatics, communication studies, and rhetoric but it will also appeal to scholars in the areas of media studies, psychology and crosscultural communication.
Isabel Ermida is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Minho in Portugal, where she is currently Head of the English Department. She holds a PhD on the Language of Humour and is the author of The Language of Comic Narratives (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). She has also authored Linguistic Ambiguity in “The Comedy of Errors” by William Shakespeare (1998) and Humour, Language and Narrative: Towards a Discourse Analysis of Literary Comedy (2003), both published in Portugal. Besides humour studies, her research interests include the linguistics/literature interface and the sociolinguistic expression of gender, age and ethnicity in media discourse.