A general mechanism of humor: reformulating the semantic overlap
It addresses the problem of understanding humor mechanisms broadly for cognitive science and linguistics, but appears incremental by building on existing theories.
The paper proposes a general cognitive mechanism for humor based on constraint overlap, extending Raskin's script overlap to non-verbal communication and claiming it as necessary and sufficient for humor across modalities.
This article proposes a cognitive mechanism of humour of general applicability, not restricted to verbal communication. It is indebted to Raskin's concept of script overlap, and conforms to the incongruity-resolution theoretical framework, but it is built on the notion of constraint, an abstract correspondence between sets of data. Under this view, script overlap is an outcome of a more abstractly described phenomenon, constraint overlap. The important concept of the overlooked argument is introduced to characterise the two overlapping constraints -- overt and covert. Their inputs and outputs are not directly encoded in utterances, but implicated by them, and their overlap results in another overlap at the level of the communicated utterances, that the incongruity reveals. Our hypothesis assumes as a given that the evocation of such constraints is a cognitive effect of the inferential process by which a hearer interprets utterances. We base this assumption on Hofstadter's theory of analogy-making as the essence of human thought. By substituting "stimuli" of any kind for "utterances" in this model, we obtain a mechanism as easily applicable to non-verbal communication -- slapstick, cartoons -- and we propose it describes the necessary and sufficient conditions for a communicative act in any modality to carry humour.