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Following Frege's lead, Dummett, as we have seen, adds to the former's list several exemplars of tone. Among these is a class of "evocative" expressions — a class that includes profanities, for instance — whose meanings are said to be uniquely governed by subjective associations connected to audience reaction or response. Intriguingly, a passing remark of Dummett's suggests that such meaning-determining mental associations can also be comic. In this section I wish to investigate the claim that natural languages contain expressions that are intrinsically humorous. Falling back on the idea of a community-wide, standardized "home setting", introduced earlier for particular classes of tonal expressions, I repair infelicities in Dummett's account of the idiosyncratic and subjective workings of evocatives and analyze the suitability of Frege's Farbung — Dummett's "tone" — for explaining the semantic character of words that many dictionaries label "jocular". Wittgenstein's idea of a shared form of life comes briefly into play, and I highlight the occurrence of such terms in unasserted contexts. In finding the condition of representationality to be decisive, a commitment to the compositionality of sentence- and utterance-meaning is preserved.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137263544_19

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