Language Craft in Eugene Ionesco’s Theater: Neological Word Games Cover Image

L’ARTISANAT LANGAGIER DANS LE THÉÂTRE D’EUGÈNE IONESCO : JEUX DE MOTS NÉOLOGIQUES
Language Craft in Eugene Ionesco’s Theater: Neological Word Games

Author(s): Elena GRAUR
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Language and Literature Studies, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Applied Linguistics, Descriptive linguistics
Published by: Universitatea Liberă Internațională din Moldova
Keywords: word game(s); asemantic language; typology (of word games; defunctionalization of normative structures; pun; theatrical language;

Summary/Abstract: We call artisans of comic, ironic, satirical language all writers of the stature of Boris Vian, Jacques Prévert, Jacques Audiberti, Eugène Ionesco who denote an awakened linguistic curiosity for the riches of literary, popular or spoken language. They actualize everything: phoneme, afixoid, pun, oxymoron, logogriph, etc. Ionesco in this pleiad is still at the head. His characters, their language must make people laugh, cry, die of happiness, otherwise they become dumb, deaf, deaf-mutes. And so Ionesco invents and puts on their tongues anagrams, antimétaboles, bouts-rimés, homéotéleutes, mots-valises to accomplish his essential task: “to create a new language”. This one will live as much as its heroes speak a neo-language where the absurdities become syllogisms, where the approximations are only true axioms. In this article, we are going to submit to a more or less detailed analysis the linguistic nature of the puns of Ionesco's theatrical language.

  • Issue Year: 2022
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 111-116
  • Page Count: 6
  • Language: French
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