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What Is Humor In Humor

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We often laugh when we see something funny or amusing. In context of informal situation with my friends I often say ‘funny’ but in formal context I have found difficulties in finding the ‘formal’ way to say funny. After searching the synonym of funny in Meriam-Webster dictionary, amusing has caught my attention and it is indeed sounds politer to me. Therefore, I have been using amusing in formal context when I meet new people as well as my superior. The problem is, it is correct to make a statement that amusing is for formal situation and funny for the informal situation. Are there any differences in context of using funny and amusing that deny the statement?
This paper is aimed to find the appropriate ways to use funny and amusing in our daily conversation. The help of corpus, we could find
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According to Hanks (2012), corpus linguistics is primarily concerned with interpreting observed language in order to arrive at statements on patterns in word meaning or syntactic composition.

Collocations was first brought up by Palmer (1933) in English language teaching. However, in 1957, Firth introduced collocations to the theoretical linguistics. Collocations are pervasive in texts of all genres and domains. Collocation can be defined as ‘the grammatical company a word keeps and the positions it refers’ (Hoey, 2005).

English is rich in synonyms and it often become a great challenge for EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners. Church (1994) in his article did a “lexical substitutability” test in a corpus study of the near-synonyms ask for, request and demand, which results the same finding: the substitutability of lexical items in the same linguistic context constitutes a good indicator of their semantic similarity.

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