In a story, an allotopy is when two basic meaning traits (semes) contradict each other; that is, when they trace two incompatible interpretations. It was conceived as being the opposite of an isotopy, which is the homogeneity resulting from repetition of the same seme. [1] The concept was coined in the 1970s by the Belgian semioticians known as Groupe μ .
In the 1970, the Belgian semioticians known under the name Groupe μ , introduced the concept of Allotopy. [2] They first discussed the concept in publications like Isotopie et allotopie, [3] Isotopie, allotopie et polytopie (1976), [4] and A Rhetoric of Poetry (1977). [5]
Groupe μ discussed the relation of allotopy to jokes and humor.[ citation needed ] Salvatore Attardo, despite not using the term allotopy, formulated a theory of humor based on the idea of the "incompatible interpretations", called the isotopy-disjunction model. [6] [7] This is part of the broader idea of defining humor as based on contradiction/incongruity.
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. He held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des plantes.
A punch line concludes a joke; it is intended to make people laugh. It is the third and final part of the typical joke structure. It follows the introductory framing of the joke and the narrative which sets up for the punch line.
Music semiology (semiotics) is the study of signs as they pertain to music on a variety of levels.
Igor Aleksandrovič Mel'čuk, sometimes Melchuk is a Soviet and Canadian linguist, a retired professor at the Department of Linguistics and Translation, Université de Montréal.
Chaïm Perelman was a Belgian philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin. He was among the most important argumentation theorists of the twentieth century. His chief work is the Traité de l'argumentation – la nouvelle rhétorique (1958), with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, translated into English as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (1969).
Groupe μ is the collective pseudonym under which a group of Belgian 20th-century semioticians wrote a series of books, presenting an exposition of modern semiotics.
Salvatore Attardo is a full professor at Texas A&M University–Commerce and was the editor-in-chief of Humor, the journal for the International Society for Humor Studies from 2002 to 2011. He studied at Purdue University under Victor Raskin and extended Raskin's script-based semantic theory of humor (SSTH) into the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH). He publishes in the field of humor in literature and is considered to be one of the top authorities in the area. He is also the author of Humor 2.0: How the Internet Changed Humor published by Anthem Press in 2023.
Marc Angenot is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.
Jean-Marie Klinkenberg is a Belgian linguist and semiotician, professor at the State University of Liège, born in Verviers (Belgium) in 1944. Member of the interdisciplinary Groupe µ. President of the International Association for visual Semiotics.
Although humor is a phenomenon experienced by most humans, its exact cause is a topic of heavy debate. There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what it is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory. These theories are used as building blocks for the rest of the theories. Among current humor researchers, there has yet to be a consensus about which of these three theories of humor is most viable. Proponents of each theory originally claimed that theirs explained all cases of humor, and that it was the only one capable of doing so. However, they now acknowledge that although each theory generally covers its area of focus, many instances of humor can be explained by more than one theory. Similarly, one view holds that theories have a combinative effect; Jeroen Vandaele claims that incongruity and superiority theories describe complementary mechanisms that together create humor.
Jacques Dubois, Professor emeritus of Literature at the Université de Liège invented the concept of the Literary Institution following the work of Pierre Bourdieu by analogy with other social institutions such as military, medical, and political. He is also a Member of the Groupe µ. In 1983, he was the main editor of the Manifesto for Walloon culture.
In mathematics, the pseudoisotopy theorem is a theorem of Jean Cerf's which refers to the connectivity of a group of diffeomorphisms of a manifold.
The idea of founding a theory of painting after the model of music theory was suggested by Goethe in 1807 and gained much regard among the avant-garde artists of the 1920s, the Weimar culture period, like Paul Klee.
In a story, we detect an isotopy when there is a repetition of a basic meaning trait (seme); such repetition, establishing some level of familiarity within the story, allows for a uniform reading/interpretation of it. An example of a sentence containing an isotopy is I drink some water. The two words drink and water share a seme, and this gives homogeneity to the sentence.
In classical rhetoric, figures of speech are classified as one of the four fundamental rhetorical operations or quadripartita ratio: addition (adiectio), omission (detractio), permutation (immutatio) and transposition (transmutatio).
A General Rhetoric is a 1970 book by the Belgian semioticians known as Groupe μ. The first part of the book reformulates classical rhetoric within semiotics, while the second part discusses the new concept of a general rhetoric, which introduces rhetorical figures for storytelling, called figures of narration.
Born from an exchange of ideas between Michel Costantini and Göran Sonesson during the congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies held in Perpignan, in the south of France, in 1988, the International Association for Visual Semiotics, whose abbreviation is AISV-IAVS, was officially founded as an association under the French law in 1989 in Blois, France, where the first international congress was held in 1990.
Henry Fourès is a French historian of music and musician.
An epiphrase is a figure of speech that consists of joining one or more sentence segments to the end of a syntactically completed sentence or group as a conclusion or to emphasize a fact.