%0 Journal Article
%T Tegelased eesti kolme rahva naljades (1964¨C2012)
%A Arvo Krikmann
%J M£¿etagused. H¨¹perajakiri
%D 2012
%I Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum and Eesti Folkloori Instituut
%X The present article gives a statistical overview of the characters of Estonian three nation jokes throughout three periods: the Soviet period, the 1990s, and the 21st century. The following subtopics are discussed:1) The Zipfian distribution of parameters of our joke corpus that complicates text- and type-based statistical analyses (so-called ¡°Zipf¡¯s curse¡±);2) The general temporal dynamics of the material and changing of the frequencies of ethnic characters through the three periods of observation;3) The correlation between the ¡°sequential number¡± (position) of the character in the text and its function: changes in frequencies of different ethnic characters as ¡°initialisers¡±, ¡°follow-uppers¡±, and ¡°punch line-makers¡± throughout the three periods; the salience of the Estonian as an ethnic figure in the 21st century; exceptional texts with more or fewer than three characters and, related to it, problems of the joke structure (syntagmatic triad versus paradigmatic-parallelistic chain, etc.).
%K three nation jokes
%K Soviet period
%K post-socialist period
%K ethnic characters
%K punch line
%U http://www.folklore.ee/tagused/nr52/krikmann.pdf