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

Levels in the language system

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

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

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