Structural ambiguity in Russian humor creation

The present paper investigates the impact of structural ambiguity on humor creation in Russian. A range of jokes is analyzed which are based on the possibility of assigning two distinct structures to the same sentence, which, in turn, results in the emergence of two opposed scripts / scenarios / readings, as is necessary for the creation of a humorous effect. We consider several types of structural ambiguity, as well as the ways in which they interact with additional linguistic phenomena, such as homonymy, polysemy and the complement / adjunct distinction.