In this chapter we explore the lower and upper boundaries of words as meaningful units, and how humour might depend upon the ambiguity or the shifting of these boundaries. In order to discuss such boundary confusions we need to establish the different levels of linguistic analysis.

Levels in the language system

We are familiar with the idea that language as a system operates at many different levels stretching from the phonemic/graphemic (sound/writing) level at one end to the sentential at the other. It has boundaries at both ends, the phonetic/graphetic at a lower level and speech act combinations and register/genre at the upper level. The different levels of language can be simplistically described as follows:

According to this model, a sentence comprises one or more clauses, a clause one or more phrases, a phrase one or more words, a word one or more morphemes and a morpheme one or more phonemes. It is theoretically possible, therefore, for a sentence to comprise only one phoneme, for instance, the reply in this dialogue:

However, for more versatility in language we exercise the option of “or more” to lengthen this chain of combinations. A more typical sentence is: “The romantic short story she was reading would have a happy ending”. We can analyse this as in Figure 2.1 (confining full analysis to the first clause).