Auteur: Salvatore I. Attardo

Salvatore Attardo was trained as a linguist at the Catholic University of Milan, Italy, where he graduated in foreign languages and literature (French), with a dissertation on the linguistics of humor, in 1986. In 1988, he moved to the United States to attend Purdue University. In 1991, together with Victor Raskin, Attardo published a long article that developed Raskin’s own semantic theory of humor into the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH). Later that year he received a Ph D in English from Purdue University, with a specialization in linguistics and a dissertation on the linguistics of humor, which was published in 1994 as his first book, Linguistic Theories of Humor. Attardo was professor of linguistics at Youngstown State University from 1992 to 2007. He coauthored, with Steven Brown, a sociolinguistics textbook, Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation (2000) and authored Humorous Texts (2001). He served as editor-in-chief of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research from 2001 to 2011. With Diana Elena Popa, he coedited the book New Approaches to the Linguistics of Humor (2007), and with Manuela Maria Wagner and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, he coedited Prosody and Humor (2013). In 2007, he became chair of the Department of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University–Commerce. In 2010, he became dean of the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts at Texas A&M University– Commerce, where he is also professor of linguistics. Attardo’s research is focused primarily on humor studies and pragmatics. He has published more than 100 articles and book reviews in scholarly journals. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Pragmatics and other journals. In the past decade, his interests have broadened to include the prosody and gestures accompanying humor, mainly working in collaboration with his wife, Lucy Pickering. In non-humor-related topics, Attardo has published in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, Italian studies, grammar, the pedagogy of linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and computational linguistics.