The aim of this paper is to determine whether humour can be used as a discursive strategy to reply to offensive humour about natural disasters and what purpose it serves. A corpus of 431 replies to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons concerning the earthquake in central Italy in August 2016 was analysed.… read more
This paper proposes a new way of analyzing the contrast between an ironic comment and the referent context by focusing on the structure of the dimension which the contrast belongs to. This new approach was stimulated by previous experimental studies demonstrating that dimensions are perceptually… read more
The communication of the uncertainty of a scientific finding largely determines whether that information will be translated to practice. Unfortunately, however, our ability to study these phenomena is restrained since existing uncertainty corpora are limited in their number of full text articles… read more
According to the cognitive approach to humour, understanding of humorous texts implies a moment of surprise, even confusion of thought, produced by the recognition of an incongruity, defined as an incoherent piece of the text. The problem solving activity involved in humor understanding aims at… read more
The aim of this paper was to analyze the 109 occurrences of Italian come se “as if” in a homogenous written corpus of 780 texts, with the aim to highlight the implied evidential and epistemic aspects, not yet explicitly studied in the pertinent literature. We used an interdisciplinary approach… read more
According to the cognitive approach to humour, the understanding of jokes implies the recognition of an incongruity followed by its resolution. Through our work, we aim to contribute to this strand of research by investigating the link between cognitive processes and the understanding of humour. In… read more
Within the framework of KUB Theory (Bongelli and Zuczkowski 2008, Zuczkowski et al. 2011), information communicated verbally can ultimately be reduced to one of three categories: what the speaker knows (Known), what the speaker does not know (Unknown) and what the speaker believes (Believed).… read more