The types of jokes due to syntactic ambiguity (Illustrated by the Vietnamese and English languages)

Abstract

Jokes are very common in our lives - brief but exquisite and artistic. Vietnamese and English language have many jokes based on the using of ambiguous languages. The listeners/readers recognize ridiculous situations or event due to the "tools" of ambiguous language in combination with the knowledge and sensitivity of their language. Syntactic ambiguity is a kind of language ambiguity and occurs in sentences that have more than one meaning because their syntactical relationships can be distinguished in different ways. There are many kinds of syntactic ambiguities, but the paper mainly examines the kind of jokes due to the attachment and analytical ambiguity. This paper presents the characteristics of syntactic ambiguity as a "means" to make up the comedy of jokes in Vietnamese and English language; at the same time, it presents the similarities and differences between the kinds of jokes due to the syntactic ambiguity of Vietnamese and English people.