It is the most cruel mockery to tell a man he may vote for A or B, when you know that he is so much under the influence of A, or the friends of A, that his voting for B would be attended with the destruction of him. It is not he who has the vote, really and substantially, but his landlord, for it is for his benefit and interest that it is exercised in the present system. David Ricardo ([1824], ...

In this article some formal, content-related and procedural considerations towards the sense of humor are articulated and the analysis of both everyday humor behavior and of comic styles leads to the initial proposal of a four factormodel of humor (4FMH). This model is tested in a new dataset and it is also examined whether two forms of comic styles (benevolent humor and moral mockery) do fit i...

Types of utterances that belong to meta-levels of activity have been singled out in spoken task-focused dialogues between subjects accomplishing a matching task with no visual contact. The types include activity management and planning, global and local (e.g. signals of activity phase); explicit evaluation of the state of joint project, communicative utterances for conversation management; back...

The paper argues that the correct definition of lying is that to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, where assertion is understood in terms of the notion of the common ground of a conversation. It is shown that this definition makes the right predictions for a number of cases involving irony, joking, and false implicature. In addition, the proposed account does not assume that ...

links the clauses “you need anything” and “I’m Jill” in a conditional construction, but semantically we may naturally perceive the propositions expressed by these clauses as conditionally unrelated; the name of the woman does not depend on whether the addressee needs anything or not. To humorously misapprehend such conditional sentences, as Martin does, is to pretend to see a conditional relati...