A taxonomy of structural ambiguity in humour with reference to translation

Abstract EN

The present study investigates the taxonomy of structural ambiguity in humorous texts.

It is found that there are many ambiguity devices used in creating humorous effects in jokes and other humorous texts.

These devices include the use of articles in plural and non- count nouns , coordinating conjunctions , the construction ' a little ' , devices affecting verb forms such as modals and tense shifting , in addition to other devices such as verb particles , idioms ...etc .It is also found that there are two main ways for translating humorous texts .The first way is to translate them semantically preserving as much as possible the humorous effect of the SL text , whereas the second way is to recontextualize the SL text through changing the reality to which it refers if translating it semantically would result in the loss of the humorous effect.