24.3036, Review: General Linguistics: Dubinsky & Holcomb (2011)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-3036. Thu Jul 25 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.3036, Review: General Linguistics: Dubinsky & Holcomb (2011)

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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 18:33:53
From: Kirstie Lock [picklemania1 at gmail.com]
Subject: Understanding Language through Humor

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-5007.html

AUTHOR: Stanley  Dubinsky
AUTHOR: Chris  Holcomb
TITLE: Understanding Language through Humor
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2011

REVIEWER: Kirstie Marie Lock, (personal interest - not currently working at a university)

SUMMARY

‘Understanding Language through Humor’ is primarily written as a supplement to
a more traditional introduction to linguistics textbook. It does not intend to
replace a standard linguistics textbook. This book is written for university
students who speak English as their native language and have the cultural
background to understand and appreciate American and British humor. It is not
written to teach linguistic vocabulary, nor does it present traditional,
ground-breaking research in each of the linguistic sub-fields. Its goal is to
explain language features using humor, which has the unique ability to
illustrate linguistic principles by breaking intrinsically understood
linguistic rules. The authors claim that this book could prove useful and
interesting to linguists at any stage of their study and career by giving them
tools to explain linguistic concepts to people around them through cartoons
and jokes.

Because this book is meant as supplementary material, it follows the normal
structure of a linguistics textbook. The first chapter introduces the purpose
of the book and successive chapters take a look at human versus animal
communication, phonology, morphology and lexicography, grammar, pragmatics,
discourse, language acquisition in children, language variation,
cross-cultural communication, language standardization, and more resources.

Chapter 1
In this short chapter, the authors explain that they are not explaining humor,
but rather using humor to illustrate linguistic principles.

Chapter 2
This chapter uses cartoons featuring animals to illustrate the difference
between human and animal communication. The authors list the three main
properties of communication: a medium, some meaning, and a purpose. The
arbitrariness of sounds, or signs, and their meaning are also introduced,
which leads the authors into some differences between animal communication and
human language. First, we can talk about things that are neither directly in
front of us, nor happening right now. Furthermore, human language is
productive, creative, and recursive.

Chapter 3
The first concept the authors cover in this chapter, on phonology, is the
difference between orthography and the actual sounds made by the speakers. The
difference is illustrated by a poem about the frustration a native French
speaker, who is learning English, has with the ‘–ough’ ending being pronounced
in so many different ways. This chapter then helps the reader understand that
English has a phonemic system and gives some illustrations of sounds that
cannot occur at the beginning of English words, but might be perfectly
acceptable initial sounds for other languages. The authors go on to talk about
the ambiguities that arise when articulation is not clear, as with insertion,
deletion, and combining sounds at word boundaries. A description of
spoonerisms, malapropisms, and mondegreens finishes out the chapter.

Chapter 4
The chapter on morphology and lexicography starts by introducing affixes. The
authors give two very nice illustrations of infixes from ‘The Simpsons’:
Homer’s –ma-, and Ned Flanders’ -diddly-. They also talk about some of the
prefixes and suffixes in English and some of the words that could be made with
affixes, but aren’t. The words ‘derivational’ and ‘inflectional’ are
introduced, defined, and illustrated. Compound words are then dealt with,
followed by shortening and lengthening words, idioms, reduplication, and
narrowing of terms versus genericization of brands. The meanings of homophone,
homograph, homonym, and polyseme are introduced and illustrated as well. The
chapter finishes with a look at new words coined by famous people like Stephen
Colbert and George W. Bush.

Chapter 5
The authors take a different approach with the chapter on grammar than they
have with other chapters. There is still humor scattered throughout to
illustrate word order, however, they also attempt to explain word order by
using math formulas. This is intended to help the reader understand how
adjectives, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses modify nouns. Next,
this chapter takes a very brief look at verbs and the objects they require,
before moving on to explain the purpose of pronouns and humorous uses of the
ambiguity they enable. Finally, the authors explain the semantic ambiguities
that can occur with the words ‘one’, ‘some’, ‘every’, and ‘all’.

Chapter 6
In this chapter, on pragmatics, the authors introduce the idea that the
grammatical form of a sentence may not be the intended speech act. Humor can
be found when one member of a conversation intentionally breaks the assumed
cooperative nature of conversation and takes the sentence literally. The
authors deal with deixis and its ambiguities, and then move on to describe
speech acts in greater detail. The Cooperative Principle is described next,
and examples are given of the ways interlocutors can break these principles
for humorous effect. The chapter ends with illustrations of presuppositions.

Chapter 7
The discourse chapter explains how we look at the structure of a text. The
authors describe the use of repetition, pronouns, moving from old to new
information, conceptual patterns, and conversational structure to move a
discourse along. The chapter goes on to talk about the context of the text,
including the relationship between speakers and listeners, and where and when
conversations take place. Most of the text examples for these two sections are
in the form of monologues from stand-up comedy, or conversations from sitcom
TV shows. The next section of the chapter lists some of the different kinds of
discourse that can be analyzed, including speaking, as well as actual texts,
and combinations of speech and text. The last section in the chapter describes
genres, and goes into a few sub-genres of humor.

Chapter 8
This chapter, on child language acquisition, starts by differentiating
learning from acquiring. It goes on to talk about the order in which children
learn the sound systems of their native language. Overextension,
underextension, and logical, but incorrect, word creation are the next topics
in this chapter. The stages of syntactic development, from one word utterances
to a child’s experimentation with morphology and negatives, are illustrated.
The chapter ends with a brief description of caregiver speech and a warning
about not letting the TV teach children to speak; rather, caregivers need to
talk to them.

Chapter 9
The chapter on language variation starts by problematizing words like
‘accent’, and ‘dialect’, and explaining the choice of ‘variety’ to refer to
the different ways speakers produce one language. To illustrate the
understanding a native speaker has of the different varieties of his/her own
language, there is a short activity, taken from the sitcom Frasier, asking
students to match sentences to types of people. The following sections
describe some of the sound, lexical, and grammatical differences between
various English varieties, and end with comments on style-shifting.

Chapter 10
This chapter, on cross-cultural communication, describes some of the
difficulties inherent in learning and using a second language. Sound system
differences are briefly introduced, followed by differences in the semantic
meaning of lexical items and an introduction to jargon. Language differences
in speech speed, volume, turn delay, and intonation are described in the next
section of this chapter, along with humorous cross-cultural situations that
can be found because of these differences.

Chapter 11
The chapter on standardization begins with defining and illustrating the
difference between hard and soft enforcement of language rules. Soft
enforcement is social pressure to speak a certain way, usually for political
or economic gain. Some of the pros (e.g. giving students a goal to reach for)
and cons (e.g. creating a barrier for people who don’t speak the standard) of
soft standardizations are described here. Hard language enforcement is
government backed, and usually involves preserving the identity of the nation
itself. The reasons for not having a national language in the United States
are listed in this section and the reasons for other countries having national
language policies are also described. This chapter ends with a discussion of
offensive speech, and how humor can allow someone to say something that is
otherwise socially unacceptable.

Chapter 12
The short, final chapter of this textbook introduces additional resources for
students to pursue.

EVALUATION

It is very easy to see how this textbook makes a good supplement to a standard
introductory textbook. It is refreshing to see the foundational aspects of
linguistics explained in the light of cartoons and jokes. Humor is a great
tool for breaking and then explaining linguistic features,  and also keeps
this type of reading enjoyable and educational.

There are a few pitfalls that a professor who might want to use this book
should watch out for. First, the authors regularly use the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as an explanatory tool for certain jokes that rely on
phonology before providing the IPA chart for the student. I am certain that
the authors are expecting a primary textbook to cover this chart in detail, so
they only cover it very briefly here. In addition, the authors use some kind
of modified phonetics with IPA symbols. The authors’ intention is to appeal to
a native speaker’s intuitive understanding of how words sound, or, as the
authors describe it, “some plain-language description” (p. 29). This means
that the phonetic descriptions which are written like IPA in this book and the
IPA in other textbooks will be different. A professor might need to provide
the student with a cross-reference of the differences between the IPA and
phonetic descriptions used in this textbook.

Second, the authors regularly use linguistic vocabulary words without
explaining them first. One of these instances is the use of the term
‘transitive’ (p. 43) in the description of inflectional affixes in the fourth
chapter, covering morphology. Perhaps the authors are relying on the high
school education of students to have taught them the difference between the
possible transitivity options for verbs. Nevertheless, a brief definition of
transitivity with a focus on how it is related to affix morphology would be
useful here, especially since the audience for this book is students who are
brand new to linguistic concepts. The word ‘transitive’ is defined in the book
in Chapter Five, which is on syntax. However, Chapter Five then assumes
students’ knowledge of direct and indirect objects, pronouns, and
prepositional phrases, without explanations.

Finally, the authors themselves often write things in a dry humorous way,
treating many linguistic topics tongue-in-cheek. Some of the humorous writing
requires an understanding of European cultural contexts, as in the difference
between ‘chianti’ and ‘hefewiezen’ (p. 21) when talking about Italian and
Austrian bee dialects. Overall, the authors do a good job walking the fine
line between funny and offensive jokes, and only the most overly sensitive
people might find some of their comments out of place.

In conclusion, the authors of ‘Understanding Language through Humor’ reached
their target audience of university students who are being introduced to
linguistics for the first time and who have another introduction to
linguistics textbook to rely on for linguistic vocabulary and foundational
studies. However, this book would not work for anyone who does not
intrinsically understand English and American or British culture. Students of
English as a second language will struggle with this text as their sole
introduction to English language linguistic topics. However, advanced English
language learners attempting to gain a better understanding of how American
and British humor works may find it helpful and interesting, especially if
they already understand linguistic features. Professors looking to use this
textbook will likely want it to be a supplement to a standard introduction to
linguistics textbook, or they will need to fill in the assumed knowledge via
lecture.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kirstie Lock received her M.A. from Payap University's Linguistics Department.
Her research interests are in developing effective teaching strategies for
English language teaching, assisting English as a second language students in
accomplishing their language learning goals, and minority language
preservation, documentation, and revitalization.








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