Page 34 - The Language of Humour

‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’ 21
‘Our son was involved in a terrible road accident’
‘Yes, the roads are terrible round here.’
(Hale and Pace)

To explain the ambiguity in some jokes requires a technical level of
clause analysis, using terms to indicate the function and relationship of
parts of the sentence: subject, verb, object, indirect object,
complement, adjunct (or adverbial). However, everyone can perceive
the two possible interpretations of sentence structure, even though they
can’t apply the labels—for example, the ambiguous headline in the next
activity.
Read through the following brief explanation of clause analysis and
then attempt the following activity: The structures of clauses (simple
sentences) in English follow several main patterns using different
elements. One essential element is the verb—which may be a single word
or a group—and the subject, which normally comes before the verb.
The simplest pattern is these two elements alone:

Following the verb can be one, or more, of the remaining elements. If
the verb is intransitive (does not require an object) there may be an
adjunct (sometimes called adverbial). Adjuncts are single words or
groups which add information about how, when or where the action
happened. Here is an example:

Graffiti added to this sentence revealed another interpretation of the
structure:

The verb is now understood as ‘like’, and ‘a banana’ or ‘an arrow’ is the
object, i.e. what the flies like, rather than how they fly.