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This paper gives a theoretical introduction to the pragmatic research on the communication of public humour in traditional and new media, notably on social media. It discusses some of the central problems relevant to humour research and media communication. It describes, among other things, how the technological affordances of traditional and new media affect the underlying participation frameworks and how audience involvement affects humour as an interactional process, in both unscripted and scripted (sometimes also fictional) mediatised discourses. This introductory article to the special issue on the creation and sharing of humour across the media also calls attention to the need for multimodal analysis of media humour, which ranges from memes to broadcasts and films, as well as to the processes of decontextualisation and recontextualisation, which are germane to the production and reception of humour in various traditional and new media contexts.

This paper explores imperfect communication in public broadcast media arising from a mismatch between a speaker’s communicative intention and the undesirable humorous effect of his/her utterances. Based on a case study of a sports media interview, it focuses on how the interviewee may violate the communicative norms governing the expected responses, and how such a violation, motivated by the desire to avoid personal accountability, generates unintended humour in the media reception framework. Adopting a socio-pragmatic approach, the paper explains how the viral success of a media interview and its humorous reception beyond the original participation framework can come to constitute a face threat for the speaker, whose professional integrity may be at stake due to public laughter and ridicule. The article identifies a specific type of a follow-up media interview that is meant as an attempt at post-factum impression management, its aim being to mitigate the face threat (and damage) caused by undesired forms of reception and unintended humorous consequences. The findings indicate that speakers not only demonstrate meta-pragmatic awareness but also engage in ‘defensive self-reflexivity’, which is an important element in one’s public self-presentation when seeking to rectify the failed seriousness of one’s prior media talk. The study contributes to our understanding of how unintended humour is discursively managed in follow-up verbal interactions in public broadcast media contexts.

This article examines the issue of evasion in mediatized political interviews in the context of right-wing populist politics. As public figures, politicians are held accountable not only for their actions but also for their prior statements. Such ‘metalingual accountability’ applies to public contexts as well as utterances made in more private situations. Based on a case-study analysis of leaked conversations with a local populist politician and a subsequent follow-up media interview, the article identifies several metapragmatic strategies that are available to interviewees aiming to evade and deny utterances originally made in the backstage region. The findings indicate that equivocation and evasiveness arise from the politicians' need to mitigate the degree of face threat. This need is particularly acute where backstage honesty can lead to frontstage scandal, as in racist comments against certain ethnic groups, whereby the speaker's status as a publically acceptable politician is in danger.

Sewage sludge management is a problem of growing importance. Anaerobic sewage sludge stabilization is commonly used technology, where organic matter contained in primary and activated sewage sludge is converted into biogas, so both, pollution control and energy recovery can be achieved. The paper deals with the effect of process temperature (36 °C, 42 °C and 50 °C) on biogas production and quality during anaerobic stabilization of primary and activated sewage sludge generated during purifying process in low‑loaded activated sludge process. Primary and activated sewage sludge samples were taken at the wastewater treatment plant Brno, Czech Republic. The characteristics of sludges (dry matter and organic dry matter content, pH, conductivity, redox potential) were dermined. Biogas production and quality was measured using 3 anaerobic systems, each of 8 batch anaerobic fermenters, at the 3 different temperature conditions 36 °C, 42 °C and 50 °C. Hydraulic retention time was 20 days. Hypothesis, which predicts that the fermentation of primary and activated sludge provides dissimilar methane quantity and quality under different temperature conditions (36 °C, 42 °C and 50 °C), was partially confirmed. Temperature 42 °C significantly increased biogas production from primary sewage sludge (by 60 % in comparison with production at 36 °C). For activated sewage sludge samples no significant influence of temperature on the biogas production was observed.

Due to the strict legislation currently in use for landfilling, anaerobic digestion has a strong potential as an alternative treatment for biodegradable waste. Coffee is one of the most consumed beverages in the world and spent coffee grounds (SCG) are generated in a considerable amount as a processing waste during making the coffee beverage. Chemical composition of SCG, presence of polysaccharides, proteins, and minerals makes from the SCG substrates with high biotechnological value, which might be used as valuable input material in fermentation process. The methane production ranged from 0.271–0.325 m3/kg dry organic matter.

This paper deals with the phenomenon of the ‘microphone gaffe’ in the context of sports broadcast talk. This peculiar communicative event is characterized by the public mediation of live talk to media audiences without the speakers being aware that they are actually on air. Adopting a general pragmatic perspective, this paper analyses the microphone gaffe in terms of its specific participation framework and discusses its humorous potential. It is argued that the key element underlying these communicative situations consists of the momentary non-acknowledgement of the media audiences by the speakers. The audience, repositioned as non-participants, actually find themselves in the role of the ‘eavesdropper’ on a private conversation. On the production side of the communicative scheme, the mistaken belief in enjoying this momentary ‘private’ speech event is accompanied by a shift of footing, where the commentators’ institutional identities become replaced with their non-public personas, evidenced by forms of backstage talk that contrasts with their frontstage performance. This paper proposes that in case of microphone gaffes, humorous effect arises from the various incongruities between the actual and the presumed footings, as well as from the subsequent recontextualizations that enclose the original communicative act within an additional communicative level. The aim of the paper is to propose and elaborate a general theoretical framework for the analysis of unintended humour in media discourse.

The text discusses the position of local academic traditions in the modern context of global academic discourse dominated by the Anglo-American rhetorical style that represents the standard for modern international academic communication. After reviewing some of the central notions attached to the discipline of genre analysis of written academic discourse, the paper argues for an extension of the traditional research agenda by calling for a broad sociolinguistics of genre. It is suggested that sociological, ethnographic, cross-cultural, translatological, pedagogical and critical approaches may enrich the current understanding of written academic genres. They can do so by revealing some of the ideologies and implicit norms on which particular disciplines rely in the discursive production and reproduction of knowledge, as well as the textual practices present in the transformation, recontextualization, translation, editing, etc., that may affect the eventual form of the academic texts produced, in particular, by non-native scholars coming from other cultural and academic backgrounds than the dominant global English-language model.

The article is a critical review of a publication in which the author proposes a semantic-pragmatic theory of analysing humour in short comic narratives.

The article provides a critical review of a research monograph on the syntactic issues - the emergence of 'online' syntax in the act of communication. It focuses especially on the interface between linguistic structures and non-linguistic situations and events, pointing out how appropriate verbalizations come into existence.