Faculdade de Filosofia da Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Abstract
Language is understood as part of a cognitive system, containing some processes as emotions, perception, categorization, abstraction and reasoning. Information processing and language understanding are active phenomena, requiring from the listener the obligation to use cognitive rules in order to resemble each sentence he or she is reading or listening to what he or she has read or heard before taking into account the perspective of textual cohesion. Thus, a cognitive rule can be defined as a general construct, a logical proposition or a fact that comes from experience.
When the speech is humorous, the incongruity must be present. This is because the physical response of laughter is caused by the coexistence of two or more inconsistent, incongruous and apparently not bound together instances. The incongruity resolution model states that the creation of humor begins with the construction of an incongruity that is resolved later due to information which is provided, but there are several processes of creating and resolving the incongruity. However, humour appreciation also implies the cognitive ability to understand the humorous material, so that it is expected that an individual should select, correctly, the original conclusion of a humorous text (Shammi & Stuss, 1999).
This study aims to understand how the cognitive mechanisms may influence the interpretation of a humorous text under the perspective of mutual intelligibility, considering the speaker and the listener in interlocutory terms. The methodological proceedings rely on asking 100 people to choose the original punch-line or funny end of seven pre-tested texts, among four hypotheses: logical but not surprising; surprising but not logical; not funny or coherent and the funny punch-line. The results are conclusive
