Syntactic Ambiguity as a Device in British Humour

The present study of ambiguity at the syntactic level in the English language focuses on its resourceful applications in the creation of jokes. Such ambiguity is therefore regarded as something to be exploited in language rather than avoided. One important conclusión will be that British humour should not be regarded as "strange" by speakers of other languages, who can only access to it by means of poor, or should we say, difficult translations, since not all types of ambiguity are translatable across languages. The study is divided into three sections, dealing firstly with bracketing of constituents and labelling of categories and functions; and secondly, focusing on transformational relationships, whereby two underlying structures are related to one surface structure. The illustrations are real jokes collected from a variety of popular joke books. British comedy programmes shown on Spanish televisión often include the studio audience's laughter—something normal in Britain but alien to Spanish programmes. Although such programmes are dubbed into Spanish, and the jokes therefore translated, the average Spaniard probably marvels at how easily the British can be made to laugh, as it is often difficult for him to understand the so-called jokes that the audience is laughing at. The point is, of course, that a great deal of British humour depends on playing with language in different ways, especially exploiting ambiguity at different levéis, which is, of course, not always easily translatable. The present study of British humour focuses on ambiguity of a syntactic type. We shall see that such ambiguity may be regarded as something to be exploited in language rather than avoided. This is easily proved: although double interpretations are always potentially present in everyday speech, for one reason or another, one of the two meanings is the "usual" one; it helps the purposes of humour to uncover the other possible meaning. If ambiguity were a serious obstacle in language, everyday communication would be infected by these double meanings, and misunderstandings would be the normal result; however, this does not seem to be the case. Some sort of mechanism within our brains is able to process the correct interpretation, perhaps 210 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses helped by context, or by the language system itself, at each moment, without even giving much thought to the other possible one. Comedians, on the other hand, do bring about the other possibility in order to make people laugh. A study of linguistic ambiguity may provide a useful insight into the nature of language and of parsing processes, which could contribute towards the writing of comedy scripts. The study is divided into three sections, dealing firstly with bracketing of constituents and labelling of categories and functions; and secondly, focusing on transformational relationships, whereby two underlying structures are related to one surface structure. Ambiguity due to bracketing A characteristic of the English language which is highly productive in terms of humour is the question of attachment of a given element, particularly in the context of the verb phrase, understood here as the whole predícate or "extended verb phrase," where different categories of phrases may be concerned. Whenever the attachment of such an element, either a whole phrase or just a single word, is possible in different constituents, then ambiguity arises. This type of bracketing has major consequences in that it affects the structure of the whole predícate, especially regarding what counts as a complement of the verb group, and of what kind, and what does not, therefore determining its subcategorization. Differences in bracketing will involve different labellings, both at the phrasal and functional levels.I shall consider two types of ambiguous bracketing, focusing first on those partióles which may be prepositions or adverbs (NP1 part NP2), and secondly on prepositional phrases proper (NP1 NP2 PP). In the first case, ambiguity results since the attachment of the particle may be to the left, thus forming a phrasal verb, or to the right, forming a prepositional phrase. In the second case, the attachment concerns a PP, which may belong with the verb, either as an adjunct or as a complement, depending on the different verbs selected, or it may be embedded in the NP2.