Former Hooters Waitress Settles Toy Yoda Suit

If you appreciate the pun behind the practical joke that led to this lawsuit, then you’ve understood, at least on some level, the linguistic features upon which it hinges. First, Toyota and Yoda both have stress on the syllable “yo.” In addition to that, the t in Toyota and the d in Yoda sound very much alike. This happens whenever a t or a d occurs between two vowels in normal, conversational, rapid speech. Try saying Latter Day Saints (as in Church of the Latter-Day Saints) rapidly and convince yourself that you didn’t say Ladder Day Saints. The fact that Toyota and toy Yoda sound alike but refer to two different things makes them homophones. This, and the fact that they could be prizes, fueled the joke that led to the lawsuit.

This example and the explanation of it illustrates this book’s central motif. The goal is not to explain humor per se. Rather, humor is used to introduce linguistic concepts and to demonstrate how language works.

Students lacking a formal background in linguistics often struggle to understand linguistic concepts when presented with language data designed to illustrate them. For example, faced with an ambiguous sentence such as The doctor interviewed the patient on pain medication, which can mean that the doctor was on pain medication or that the patient was, students often have difficulty perceiving the structural ambiguity involved.

One way around this is to find a bit of humor that relies on the same sort of ambiguity, in this case, the fact that an end-of-sentence modifier can describe either the sentential subject or its object. An example of humor illustrating this is found in a Wizard of Id strip from many years ago:

Here, the adjective fried, just like the prepositional phrase on pain medication, can be understood to modify either the subject or the object. In Spook’s question to Turnkey, he means for it to modify squid. Turnkey’s answer takes fried as an (infrequently used) synonym for drunk or high and uses it to describe the sentential subject (that is, himself). To understand and laugh at the joke in the Wizard of Id strip, one must understand and process the ambiguity, and laughing at the joke means that you “got it.” Once you get the joke, you have at least tacitly understood the ambiguity and can then be shown why it’s funny and what linguistic principles are involved. Using cartoons, jokes, and other entertaining bits of information to illustrate such principles, this book makes it easier to understand them, while keeping the reader’s attention and interest. Organized as an introduction to linguistics text, the book covers all the major topics of a linguistics survey course, but in a manner that keeps the reader’s attention and is entertaining and informative throughout.

Note that this book is about linguistics and not humor – understanding language through humor, rather than understanding humor through language. That said, the book most often leverages genres of humor, namely those which are most revealing of linguistic structure and meaning. Specifically, in our selection of jokes, cartoons, and other entertaining examples, we assume that laughter most often springs from incongruity, ambiguity, or contradiction. This is to say that humor most typically involves having two or more incongruous meanings spring from a single sound, word, expression, or situation. Recall the Toyota/toy Yoda joke gone bad, where two very different meanings arose from a single sequence of sounds. Or recall the adjective fried from the Wizard of Id strip, which referenced the two incongruous meanings of a single word. Rather than argue the merits of using incongruity to discuss humor, we simply rely on it as a tool for revealing linguistic concepts in the material featured throughout this book.

If you’ve read this far, we will assume that you are planning to read the rest of this book. To help you plan for that, we will briefly review here what you should expect to find in each of the chapters that follow. As already noted, this book is structured to introduce the reader to the various subfields of linguistic inquiry, and it is therefore arranged like a typical introductory linguistics text.

• Chapter 2 presents the basic components of communication systems, surveying animal communication and showing how human language is very distinct and specially endowed.

• Chapter 3 takes a close look at the sounds of human language, discussing both phonetics (the properties of speech sounds and how they are produced) and phonology (how language sounds are perceived and mentally represented by those using them).

• Chapter 4 addresses morphemes (the smallest meaningful bits of language) and words (which are sometimes individual morphemes and are sometimes combinations of them). The chapter looks at how these morphemes are assembled into words and how they come to have the meanings they do.

• Chapter 5 takes a deep dive into word meaning and examines how it is conceptualized and used, as well as how it changes over time.

• Chapter 6 steps into the realm of names, which differ so much from ordinary words in their meaning and use that they merit their own chapter. The chapter also highlights the interface between culture and naming practices.

• Chapter 7 examines the nature of phrases (groups or strings of words) and sentences (strings of words that represent complete thoughts or propositions). This chapter focuses on the internal structure of these phrases and on how this structure can affect meaning independently of their component words.

• Chapter 8 steps away from language as an autonomous entity and enters into the realm of language use. It focuses on sentences in context, discussing indirect speech and principles of conversational cooperation.

• Chapter 9 explores children’s acquisition of language, examining how they do it, how they do it as effortlessly as they do it, and how their errors reveal the inner workings of the acquisition process.

• Chapter 10 explores language variation across regional, social, cultural, and professional groups, treating variant forms at the levels of pronunciation, word choice, syntax, and language use.

• Chapter 11 looks at writing systems, at the origins and evolution of writing, at the different types of systems, and at how decisions about writing take on religious and political importance.

• Chapter 12 explores the use of language in the digital world, the rapid changes that technology has brought to human language communication, and how these changes have affected our use of language.

This introduction would be remiss if it did not address the question of who this book is written for. We really think that this book will be of great use to a broad range of readers, from those who are not yet sure what “linguistics” are, to those who are secure in their knowledge of what linguistics is and who have studied it for some time. If this is your first exposure to linguistics, you may have picked up the book because you’re interested in language generally. This book will serve well to introduce you to the major moving parts of language, even if it’s not being used as a coursebook. If you are enrolled in an introductory course, then this book might be your main textbook (coupled with additional readings), or it might be paired with a more technically oriented textbook. In either case, you should know that the topics covered in this text will be presented in a nontechnical fashion and in a way that should make them more understandable, regardless of what other resources you will be using. If nothing else, you will likely be more entertained by the presentation of concepts in this text than you will be elsewhere. If you are a student or teacher of linguistics and already quite familiar with the conceptual material in this book, then we think that you will have a great appreciation of the way the topics are presented, and our presentation of these might provide some useful material that can be used to explain these concepts to your students, your friends, or your family. Finally, if you are a linguistics major or a professional linguist, you might consider giving this book as a gift to everyone who ever asks you: “What are linguistics, anyway?”