Language Related Research Vol.4, No.

3 (Tome 15), Fall 2013

The Violation of Grice Cooperative Maxims and

Its Role in Developing the Modern Generation of
Iranian Jokes

Reza Kheirabadi
Ph.D. in Linguistics, The Research and Training Plan Organization, Tehran, Iran

Receive: 13/10/2012 Accept: 16/1/2013

The linguistic study of Humor has a rich and long history, and the
systematic research on linguistic mechanisms of humor goes back to
Raskins semantic theory of humor (1985). Besides the elements such as
incongruity, ambiguity and exaggeration, flouting of Grice maxims (1975) of
Cooperative Principle (CP) is one of the most reviewed techniques of
producing humor, which has been the subject of various linguistics studies.
In this research, we study the role of maxim flouting in producing so-called
pa-na-pa (so what conversational style) jokes, which have been recently
spread initially on the Internet and then in the society. We also depict the
process in a three-part algorithm. This new generation of Iranian jokes is
considerable not only because of their linguistic but also because of its
sociolinguistics characteristics in which there is no trace of insulting
language toward social and ethnic minorities that itself shows a paradigm
shift in Iranian jokes.

Keywords: Linguistics, Cooperative principle, Maxim flouting, Humor.

Corresponding Authors Email: r_kheirabadi@yahoo.com

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