ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss jokes that play primarily at the level of pragmatics. Establishing the boundary line between pragmatics and semantics is not simple, since there is ongoing disagreement among scholars as to what belongs on either side of the boundary, and according to any demarcation we may choose, there will always be boundary phenomena. I take the term “pragmatic analysis” to be the analysis of a particular unit of discourse in a context of use. As far as pragmatics v. semantics is concerned, I adopt the view that semantics is concerned with the linguistic meaning of sentences, i.e., inasmuch as possible, their invariant or context-free meaning, whereas pragmatics is concerned with utterances in their context of use.
