Abstract
This paper aims to apply Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory (1986; 1995; 1987) and the two stage incongruity-resolution theory of humour (Attardo 1994) to explain how humorous interpretations are produced in a corpus of political billboards published by the Labour Party in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 British election campaigns. The intersemiosis (O’Halloran 2008) between the verbal and the visual will be taken into account in order to decode the meanings transmitted. It will be suggested that the viewers’ access to background beliefs and assumptions in order to form a context against which new incoming information can be processed is also essential in order to decode meaning. The extraction of strongly or weakly implicated information is a good source of humorous effects. It will also be suggested that the interpretation depends on the viewer’s ideology, as “relevance is always relevance to an individual” (Sperber & Wilson 1986: 142).
References
Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic Theories of Humour. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Baldry, A. & Thibault, P. J. (2006). Multimodal Transcription and Text. London: Equinox.
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana.
Cheong, Y. Y. (2004). ‘The construal of ideational meaning in print advertisements,’ in O’Halloran, K. (ed.), Multimodal Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum, pp. 163-195.
El Refaie, E. (2003). ‘Understanding visual metaphor: The example of newspaper cartoons.’ Visual Communication, 2, pp. 75-95.
Forceville, C. (1996). Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising. London & New York: Routledge.
Forceville, C. (2005). ‘Addressing an audience: Time, place and genre in Peter van Straaten’s calendar cartoons.’ Humour: International Journal of Humour Research, 18, pp. 247-278.
Gozzi, R. (1999). ‘The power of metaphor: In the age of electronic media.’ ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 56, pp. 380-389.
Iedema, R. (2001). ‘Resemioticisation.’ Semiotica, 137, pp. 23-39.
Johnson-Cartee, K. S. & Copeland, G. A. (1991). Negative Political Advertising. Coming of Age. London: Lawrence Earlbaum.
Johnson-Cartee, K. S. & Copeland, G. A. (1997). Inside Political Campaigns. Praeger Series in Political Communication.
Kaplan, S. (2005). ‘Visual metaphors in print advertising for fashion products,’ in Smith, K., Moriarty, S., Barbatsis, G. & Kenney, K (eds.), The Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods and Media. London: Routledge, pp. 167-177.
Kress, G. (2010). ‘A social semiotic multimodal approach to human communication: Implications for speech, writing and applied linguistics,’ in Caballero, R. & Pinar, M. J. (eds.), Modes and Ways in Human Communication. Cuenca: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, pp. 77-92.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal Discourse. The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication Discourse. London: Arnold.
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Lasswell, H. (1948). ‘The structure and function of communication in society,’ in Bryson, L. (ed.), The Communication of Ideas. New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies, pp. 37-51.
Lemke, J. L. (1998). ‘Multiplying meaning: Visual and verbal semiotics in scientific text,’ in Martin, J. R. & Veel, R. (eds.), Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science. London: Routledge, pp. 87-113.
Martinec, R. (2005). ‘A system for image-text relations in new (and old) media.’ Visual Communication, 4, pp. 337-371.
Martineau, W. H. (1972). ‘A model of the social functions of humour,’ in Goldstein, J. H. & McGhee, P. E. (eds.), The Psychology of Humour. New York: Academic Press, pp. 101-125.
McNair, B. (2003). An Introduction to Political Communication. London & New York: Routledge.
Messaris, P. (1996). Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Moya, J. & Pinar, M. J. (2008). ‘Compositional, interpersonal and representational meanings in a children’s narrative: A multimodal discourse analysis’. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, pp. 1601-1619.
Moya, J. & Pinar, M. J. (2009). ‘On interaction of image and verbal text in a picture book. A multimodal and systemic functional study,’ in Ventola, E. & Moya, J. (eds.), The World Told and the World Shown. Multisemiotics Issues. London: Palgrave, pp. 107-123.
O’Halloran, K. (2005). Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images. London: Continuum.
O’Halloran, K. (2007a). ‘Mathematical and scientific forms of knowledge: A systemic functional multimodal grammatical approach,’ in Christie, F. & Martin, J. R. (eds.), Language. Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London: Continuum, pp. 205-236.
O’Halloran, K. (2007b). ‘Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) approach to mathematics, grammar and literacy.’ in McCabe, A., O’Donnell, M. & Whitakker, R. (eds.), Advances in Language and Education. London: Continuum, pp. 75-100.
O’Halloran, K. (2008). ‘Systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA): Constructing ideational meaning using language and visual imagery.’ Visual Communication, 7, pp. 443-475.
Pinar, M. J. (2008). ‘Decoding meaning in political cartoons,’ in Jones, C. & Ventola, E. (eds.), From Language to Multisemiotics. London: Equinox, pp. 313-332.
Pinar, M. J. (2012). ‘Ethnic humour and political advertising,’ in Chovance, J. & Ermida, I. (eds.), Language and Humour in the Media. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 211-230.
Royce, T. D. (1998). ‘Synergy on the page: Exploring intersemiotic complementarity in page-based multimodal text’. JASFL Occasional Papers, 1, pp. 25-49.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1987). ‘Précis of Relevance: Communication and Cognition’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 10, pp. 697-710.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd expanded ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tsakona, V. (2009). Language and image interaction in cartoons: Towards a multimodal theory of humor. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, pp. 1171-1188.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.
Ventola, E. (1999). ‘Semiotic spanning at conferences: Cohesion and coherence in and across conference papers and their discussions’, in Bublitz, W., Lenk, U. & Ventola, E. (eds.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to Create it and How to Transcribe it. Amsterdam & New York: John Benjamins, pp. 101-125.
Yus, F. (2003). ‘Humor and the search for relevance.’ Journal of Pragmatics, 35, pp. 1295-1331.
Wilson, D. (1994). ‘Relevance and understanding’, in Brown, G. & Malmkjaer, K. (eds.), Language and Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35-58.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (2002). ‘Relevance theory,’ in Horn, L. R. & Ward, G. L. (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics. London: Blackwell, pp. 607-632.