Misunderstandings in technology-mediated communication can be due to a lack of tone and facial expression on the part of the speaker, which provide additional context clues into the meaning of the message beyond textual representation. As technology becomes more of a ubiquitous element in our interactions with one another, further study into the ways in which language and humor are conveyed online and impact human communication is essential. Analyzing Language and Humor in Online Communication presents a compendium of research into virtual communities, online communication, social networks, and the ways that language, and humor in particular, are being conveyed and understood in these digital environments. Emphasizing examples from popular culture and contemporary media, this innovative publication fills the current void in the literature by focusing specifically on humor creation and perception in the digital age. Students, researchers, linguists, psychologists, media professionals, and sociologists will find this publication to be a unique reference source.

Language and Humour in the Media provides new insights into the interface between humour studies and media discourse analysis, connecting two areas of scholarly interest that have not been studied extensively before. The volume adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, concentrating on the various roles humour plays in print and audiovisual media, the forms it takes, the purposes it serves, the butts it targets, the implications it carries and the differences it may assume across cultures. 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.

This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

This book provides a first thorough analysis of internet humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, covering a wide range of discourses that are pervasive online and focusing especially on messaging interactions, social networking sites and memes. Its chapters describe the inferential strategies implemented to turn online coded discourses into meaningful interpretations, which in turn can be devised and manipulated for the sake of humour. Furthermore, and apart from the typical object of pragmatic research (humorous discourses), the book emphasises the importance of the interfaces’ design and of the qualities of the users engaged in humorous interactions (called contextual constraints), additionally highlighting the parallel significance of the various effects, shaped as feelings and emotions, that stem from humorous communication on the internet. In sum, the book delivers a rich and detailed account of humorous internet discourses through dissecting their affordances as a medium, tracking the users’ intentions, and predicting the audiences’ interpretive strategies, with the goal of helping the reader obtain a better understanding of internet humour and its role in today’s online interactions.

This book was born out of the idea that domain-specific knowledge has two major dimensions, since, on the one hand, peer-to-peer communication is primarily intended to further research within specific disciplines, while, on the other, domain-external, asymmetric communication of ‘filtered’ knowledge caters to different types of lay-audiences. Collectively, the chapters in the volume take the reader on a journey through knowledge communication and knowledge (re)presentation strategies that are able to successfully disseminate and communicate. The domains under scrutiny are medicine and health, corporate communication, cultural heritage and tourism. A number of issues are addressed at the interface of corpus linguistics, genre studies and multimodal analysis. The variety of questions posed and methods used to explore corpus data will contribute to further debate among scholars in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, multimodality, media studies and computer-mediated communication.

The Ethics of Humour in Online Slavic Media Communication is devoted to research on how the rules of humour used online media are changing and how these changes rearrange the traditions of speech interaction in media communication. The authors of the book are experienced researchers in the field of Slavic media linguistics and represent five neighbouring countries: Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Poland. The research in the volume is based on the data from Slavic languages. The diversity and, at the same time, relative proximity of Slavic languages make it possible to put separate studies into a wider comparative context, in order to reveal the general and ethno-cultural patterns in using means of communicative etiquette; it helps define the ethno-cultural factors behind the formation of such means. Speech practice of humour creation shows the creative potential of all languages, including the ones with a small number of speakers – Slovak and Belarusian, which have the status of state languages, but are strongly influenced by international languages (English and Russian). This volume is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of Slavic studies.

Much of today's communication is carried out through various kinds of humor, and we therefore need to be able to understand its many aspects. Here, two of the world's leading pioneers in humor studies, Alleen and Don Nilsen, explore how humor can be explained across the numerous sub-disciplines of linguistics. Drawing on examples from language play and jokes in a range of real-life contexts, such as art, business, marketing, comedy, creative writing, science, journalism and politics, the authors use their own theory of 'Features, functions and subjects of Humor' to analyze humor across all disciplines. Each highly accessible chapter uses a rich array of examples to stimulate discussion and interaction even in large classes. Supplemental PowerPoints to accompany each of the 25 chapters are available online, taking many of the insights from the chapters for further interactional discussions with students.