How to Understand and Assess a Theory: The Evolution of the SSTH into the GTVH and Now into the OSTH

Abstract

The main thrust of this paper is to present to an important adjacent scholarly community of literary scholars how humor can be treated by the current strand of contemporary linguistics, or – more specifically – by linguistic semantics. In the process, we will show how a major theory of humor, the Semantic Script-based Theory of Humor (Raskin, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 325–335, 1979a, Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, 1985; Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor, 1994) first evolved into the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo/Raskin, HUMOR – International Journal of Humor Research 4: 293–347, 1991; Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor, 1994), and now into the Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor (Raskin/Triezenberg, Ontological Semantics of Humor: Pre-Conference Tutorial, Youngstown State University, 2005; Raskin, From SSTH to GTVH to OSTH, Finally, University of California, 2009; Hempelmann, From SSTH to GTVH to OSTH: The LM in OSTH, University of California, 2009; Taylor, SO in OSTH: Ontological Semantic View of Script Overlap/Oppositeness Support, University of California, 2009, Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing 1: 3, 2010).