Imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay in the sitcom Modern Family: A relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatic approach
Imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay in the sitcom Modern Family: A relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatic approach

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay, with a view to delineating the waytwo concepts or only one concept is valid for the discourse. Second, it investigates the source of the contextualinformation required for the identification of the target expression. The analysis is performed in the light of Sperberand Wilson’s Relevance Theory. It will be demonstrated that the target concept is accessed via activating a searchfor relevance triggered by the phonetic similarity between two concepts as well as the linguistic context. Thefindings of a study will demonstrate that puns stemming from imperfect homophony can be divided into thosein which two concepts are facilitated and juxtaposed in linguistic context and thus their encyclopaedic entriesare fully valid for the overall humorous interpretation and those in which only one novel concept is valid for theongoing conversation. In addition, the puns under analysis can be categorised according to the criterion of thesource of contextual information required for the identification of the target expression. In the paper, the keyrole of context will be discussed and specified, with the emphasis on the viewer’s perspective. The theoreticalproposals are illustrated with imperfect homophony-based puns derived from the sitcom Modern Family.

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