Book review: Salvatore Attardo (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Humor

Abstract

(pragmatically and referentially) in the relevant stretch of language’ (p. 34). Including a gloss would help readers, especially those who do not have English as their first language, to interpret such examples. This lack of context around examples occurs throughout the book and I encourage Mammadov in his anticipated second edition (p. xii) to expand upon his concepts by complementing them with clear and fully explained examples, as opposed to including, for example, words removed from their contexts of use. Furthermore, in a second edition, some other issues could be tidied up, such as the repeat of a paragraph (pp. 63–64) and incorrect references to examples (pp. 83–84). A change in formatting that would ease the burden of the readers would be to incorporate the examples in ‘Image and Text Materials’ directly within the text. Embedding these examples would allow Mammadov the opportunity to walk readers through how each example demonstrates his point. This format would also be enjoyable for readers; anyone with an interest in reading this book would be eager for genuine examples to interact with and analyse. Intended as a course textbook, I feel this would be better placed as a supplementary reading. While this book does provide an introduction to studies in text and discourse by way of including previous research and examples, with the nature of dialogue being so complex, providing a complete coursebook for such a topic in 145 pages is a task that anyone would find nearly impossible, especially because this topic requires examples and ample context for understanding. This work has a place in a linguistics or English language teacher course, but, as commonly found with the majority of courses, there would most likely be a need for additional readings for further insights into discourse and text studies.