The power of metonymy in humour:

Author(s): Sabina Tabacaru,Kurt Feyaerts / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

This paper is grounded in Cognitive Linguistics (CL), which sees metonymy as a conceptual phenomenon, in which one conceptual entity (the source) provides mental access to another entity (the target) within the same conceptual domain (Radden & Kövecses 1999), as opposed to metaphor, which is seen as a mapping between different domains (Lakoff 1987). Our view on metonymy slightly deviates from the mainstream CL-approach, as we reinterpret the criterion of the single domain as an epiphenomenon of the conceptually defined contiguous relationship (Feyaerts 1999), which we take to be metonymy’s categorical feature. In this contribution, we analyse the structural role of metonymy in humorous interactional sequences as they occur in the American television-series House M.D. and The Big Bang Theory. As our examples qualify as staged communicative acts, the interpretation of which involves processing meanings on different layers, we use Clark’s (1996) layering model to account for the humorous uses of metonymies and to show that metonymic connections lie at the heart of pragmatic inferencing. In line with – and at the same time extending – earlier work (Feyaerts & Brône 2005) on the potential of metonymic chaining to generate humorous and expressive meanings, this study demonstrates how a metonymic relationship may extend across different layers of meaning – the ‘serious’ discourse base space and a ‘non-serious’ pretence space – to generate a humorous meaning, based on the common ground between the speakers and the audience.

The humorous language of street dissent:

Author(s): Oya Morva / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

Owing to its critical and creative potential, humour has often been used as one of the preferred means of resistance in social and political protests. In addition, the presence of humour is also increasing in the new social movements of recent history. The essential questions that this article aims to answer are how humour functions and what its purpose is amidst a time of numerous and notable social movements. During the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the protesters made significant use of humour that specifically targeted the control of the authorities over public life, thus providing a good case with which to study humour in social movements. One form which the protesters used to disseminate humorous messages was graffiti. In this article, the graffiti from the Gezi Park protests is examined using a critical discourse analysis model. In order to achieve the intended aims, Van Dijk’s (1995) understanding of ideological discourse analysis arguing that dominated groups may have ideologies that effectively organise the social representation needed for resistance and change, is taken as a point of departure. However, this work specifically relies on Fairclough’s (1992) three dimensional discourse analysis that covers the object (the text), the process (discursive practice) and the socio-historical conditions (social practice). Research on the language of Gezi graffiti shows that the humorous language of the protesters identified and differentiated the actors of the movement, and it did not only help them to cope with the domination and oppression to which they were subjected, but also increased support for development in the desired direction.

Commentary piece

Author(s): John POLIMENI / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2016

A prominent humour theory suggests that most jokes will violate a subjective moral principle. This paper explores the ramifications of Thomas Veatch’s social violations theory of humour, and hypothesizes that jokes tend to produce four distinct humour emotions, in a sequential manner. The final emotional response to a humorous stimulus involves an aesthetic judgement about the inference of the joke. Humour could therefore be a cognitive-emotional mechanism used to appraise social norms while laughter serves to signal appreciation for the social inferences associated with the joke. It is further proposed that the cognitive-emotional structure of humour implies an evolutionarily adaptive function.

Towards the automatic detection and identification of English puns

Author(s): Tristan Miller,Mladen Turković / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

Lexical polysemy, a fundamental characteristic of all human languages, has long been regarded as a major challenge to machine translation, human–computer interaction, and other applications of computational natural language processing (NLP). Traditional approaches to automatic word sense disambiguation (WSD) rest on the assumption that there exists a single, unambiguous communicative intention underlying every word in a document. However, writers sometimes intend for a word to be interpreted as simultaneously carrying multiple distinct meanings. This deliberate use of lexical ambiguity — i.e. punning — is a particularly common source of humour, and therefore has important implications for how NLP systems process documents and interact with users. In this paper we make a case for research into computational methods for the detection of puns in running text and for the isolation of the intended meanings. We discuss the challenges involved in adapting principles and techniques from WSD to humorously ambiguous text, and outline our plans for evaluating WSD-inspired systems in a dedicated pun identification task. We describe the compilation of a large manually annotated corpus of puns and present an analysis of its properties. While our work is principally concerned with simple puns which are monolexemic and homographic (i.e. exploiting single words which have different meanings but are spelled identically), we touch on the challenges involved in processing other types.

Translating humour in audiovisual media

Author(s): Peter Zolczer / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2016

The article investigates humour translation in audiovisual media concentrating on two modes of audiovisual translation: dubbing and subtitling. The corpus consists of humorous scenes collected from two popular American situational comedies, namely Friends (1994) and The Big Bang Theory (2007). The analysis is based on the comparison of the humorous scenes in their original (English) audio track with their dubbed and subtitled Hungarian versions. Only those humorous scenes were selected and analysed in which the humorous load is mediated by language- and/or culture-specific humorous elements. The study focuses on the differences between the scenes’ humorous load in their original, dubbed, and subtitled versions. The methodology of the research is based on Juan José Martínez-Sierra’s case study “Translating Audiovisual Humour” (2009). The results show that in certain cases there is a difference between the humorous load in the dubbed and subtitled versions which can be traced back to the differences between the constraints of dubbing and subtitling.

Book review

Author(s): Mostafa Abedinifard / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2015

Graphic and political humour in Argentina:

Author(s): Liliana Ruth Feierstein / Language(s): English Issue: 2/3/2015

The article analyses the tradition of critical cartoons in Argentina using the lens of Freud’s conception of humour. After the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983 Rudy and Daniel Paz created a new style that came to be known as “ethical humour”. In their daily cartoon on the first page of the newspaper Página 12 they commented on the worst news of the day employing what Freud referred to as the humorous distance. The article proposes a historicised appraisal of humour through an elaboration of the connection between the beginnings of the comic genre and psychoanalysis. I argue that the tiny images in the daily newspapers served as chronicles, in the Benjaminian sense, of those dimensions of social life that tend to go unnoticed by historians; they offered a microscopic, childlike humour as a means of grasping social realities. Graphic humour in these political cartoons and comics in Argentina performs multiple functions: criticizing, conferring voices, generating distance, and helping to live, whilst preserving a profoundly humane dimension.

Book review

Author(s): Margherita Dore / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2014

Political ridicule and humour under socialism

Author(s): Christie Davies / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

Socialism produces distinct forms of humorous ridicule that are relatively rare in capitalist, bourgeois democracies. These forms are arranged in a hierarchy that reflects the distribution of power in this type of social and political order, one which differs markedly from a bourgeois democracy or indeed even a traditional or dictatorial authoritarian society. Merely authoritarian societies lack the kind of over-riding ideology and central control of economic and cultural life that are the defining characteristics of socialism. Socialist humorous ridicule is cruel at the top; then comes an aggressive and admonishing, but in intention humorous, official ridicule employed by the state in pursuit of centrally defined political ends. Finally, there is the ridicule by ordinary people of the elite and the social order they have imposed on the masses who respond by spontaneously and autonomously inventing and circulating innumerable jokes and anecdotes. This pattern is a product of the exercise of a monopoly of political and economic power by the leaders of the Communist Party and the distinctive political inequality that characterises socialism, an inequality based not on ownership but on differential access to the power of the state. The rulers of merely authoritarian societies that were not socialist such as Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile or Afrikaner South Africa did not and could not attain the same kind of hegemony that was possible under socialism because there existed economic, religious, scientific and even legal institutions that enjoyed a substantial degree of independence from their political rulers. Accordingly, they did not exhibit to anything like the full extent the patterns of humour to be found under socialism. The aggregate patterns of humour in socialist societies must be treated not as interactions between individuals but as ‘social facts’ to be understood in relation to other social facts, notably the nature of political power, with both sets of social facts being contrasted with those to be found in the capitalist democracies that are the antithesis of socialism.

A statistical analysis of satirical Amazon.com product reviews

Author(s): Stephen Skalicky,Scott Crossley / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

A corpus of 750 product reviews extracted from Amazon.com was analyzed for specific lexical, grammatical, and semantic features to identify differences between satirical and non-satirical Amazon.com product reviews through a statistical analysis. The corpus contained 375 reviews identified as satirical and 375 as non-satirical (750 total). Fourteen different linguistic indices were used to measure features related to lexical sophistication, grammatical functions, and the semantic properties of words. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found a significant difference between review types. The MANOVA was followed by a discriminant function analysis (DFA), which used seven variables to correctly classify 71.7 per cent of the reviews as satirical or non-satirical. Those seven variables suggest that, linguistically, satirical texts are more specific, less lexically sophisticated, and contain more words associated with negative emotions and certainty than non-satirical texts. These results demonstrate that satire shares some, but not all, of the previously identified semantic features of sarcasm (Campbell & Katz 2012), supporting Simpson’s (2003) claim that satire should be considered separately from other forms of irony. Ultimately, this study puts forth an argument that a statistical analysis of lexical, semantic, and grammatical properties of satirical texts can shed some descriptive light on this relatively understudied linguistic phenomenon, while also providing suggestions for future analysis.

Book review

Author(s): Jorge Fernández Jaén / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2014

Raised eyebrows as gestural triggers in humour:

Author(s): Sabina Tabacaru,Maarten Lemmens / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

The growing interest in humour within the field of Cognitive Linguistics during the past few years has led to the conclusion that humour exploits inferences through linguistic imagery and is highly creative. Following Yus (2003: 1299), we assume that humour uses discourse markers that allow the audience to see that what is being said should not be taken seriously. In this study, based on a large corpus of examples extracted from two American t elevision series ( House M.D. and The Big Bang Theory ), we add a yet unexplored multimodal perspective that of facial expressions accompanying humorous utterances, particularly pertaining to sarcasm and hyper understanding. More specifically, we present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of raised eyebrows used in interactional humour, arguing that they play a role in switching the context to a humorous interpretation. Our study analy ses humorous utterances against the background of Clark’s layering m odel and Fauconnier’s mental spaces theory. We illustrate how raised eyebrows function as “gestural triggers” allowing the hearer to make the connection between explicature (i.e. what is explicitly communicated by an utterance; cf. Carston 2002, 2004) and implicature ( i.e. assumptions that are not explicit and that the hearer has to infer from the contextual environment cf. Grice 1989). As such, we show that raised eyebrows play an important role in the understanding of the humorous message because they gu ide the hearer to interpret utterances in a humorous way and they contribute to meaning construction.

“Jerome at the BBC”:

Author(s): Dalbir S. Sehmby / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

Through characters who openly express distress over imagined pains, “Jerome at the BBC” treats BBC’s Three Men in a Boat as a playful critique of heroic masculinity, or what the paper defines as confident cognisant agency. Air ing in 1975, BBC’s ad aptation is released after the media ascension of James Bond and in the heyday of tough Hollywood heroes, bold figures who refuse to complain about, let alone give in, to physical pain unlike Jerome’s men. Jerome’s original and its BBC adaptation are lay ered comical texts. By channelling Jerome’s critique of the colonial, seafaring male into contemporary notions of the Hollywood hero type, this paper examines the BBC film’s boisterous lack of masculine agency, the quiet parody of action sequences, and the gingerly movement towards a conclusion that does not bang, but whimpers. Moreover, the paper asserts that the humour also functions on a less grand level, by being an effective caricature of human behaviour a healthy dose of cultural self mockery. Furth ermore, through revealing moments, by the telefilm’s end, the characters do not simply remain caricatures to be laughed at, but become identifiable and relatable human beings.

Book review

Author(s): Sharon Lockyer / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

Humour in popularisation:

Author(s): Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2013

This paper investigates the role of humour in TED talks, which are popularising speeches aiming at knowledge dissemination. Through the analysis of humour used in Eugene Cordero’s 2012 talk ‘Improv Everywhere: A TED speaker’s worst nightmare’, Sebastian Wernicke’s ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TED talks)’, and Julia Sweeney’s ‘It’s time for ‘The Talk’’, the paper analyses TED talks as an innovative tool of popularisation, which breaches the typical triangularisation ‘scientist-mediator-audience’, bringing scientists directly into contact with their audiences. Using classifications of humour theories described by Raskin (1985) and Attardo (1994), the paper analyses how humour in TED talks arises from a pleasant psychological shift of incongruity, when it is the “consequence of the discrepancy between two mental representations”; from a sense of superiority, when a person laughs about his/her own misfortunes or of others; or from a release reaction, when laughter is used to release tensions deriving from taboo topics, such as sexuality, politics, and religion. The talks show how humour is an endemic feature of this genre of popularising texts. In contrast with other forms of ‘canonical’ popularisation, these talks are not only delivered in a simple, clear, original, and relevant way, but also in a way that is enjoyable for the audience, which actively interacts with the speaker through humour.

Book review

Author(s): Vasia Tsami / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2013

Editorial:

Author(s): Villy Tsakona,Diana Elena Popa / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

This special issue includes 6 of the papers which were part of the political humour panel in Krakow one year ago. In the present introduction we will try to discuss some recent developments in the analysis of political humour, as brought to the surface by recent publications. We will try to avoid long references to concepts and issues that were extensively discussed in Tsakona & Popa (2011b), even though some overlapping may eventually be inevitable. Hopefully, the papers included here and the ensuing discussion will allow us to shed some new light on political humour and to open new horizons to future political humour researchers.

Humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse

Author(s): Marta Dynel / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2013

The paramount goal of this paper is to tease out a number of universal communicative phenomena which carry humour appreciated by the recipient of a drama series, based on data culled from a famous medical drama series, “House”. This broad-range study aims to shed light on the humorous phenomena in dramatic discourse, which evinces greater similitude than comedy discourse. It is argued that conversational humour is prevalent in dramatic discourse, manifesting itself in rhetorical figures (e.g. creative metaphor or irony) and pragmatic types (e.g. teasing), which can also be categorised depending on whether or not they display genuine aggression. Two more humour types are also presented as part of conversational humour, namely: non-verbal expression and (non-)parodic impersonation. Additionally, several other sources of humour are distinguished, such as: a character’s quirky behaviour (including participatory behaviour and impoliteness), uncanny events, situational irony, and deception. While the humorous capacity of such concepts has already been recognised, their position in the research on film discourse and in humour studies is not yet well-established. It will be argued that these phenomena manifest humorousness to the hearer on the second communicative level, the recipient, and are not necessarily humorous at the characters’ level. All the humour forms distinguished are neatly captured by incongruity theory, specifically the incongruity-resolution model, coupled with superiority theory in the case of disaffiliative humour.

Sobre la importancia de la documentación notarial para la historia de la lengua española El caso de las perífrasis deónticas con deber

Author(s): Andrzej Zieliński / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 19/2020

On the occasion of the celebration of the centenary of the publication of Documentos lingüísticos de España, by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, two objectives are proposed: to state the importance of notarial documentation for the history of the Spanish language and to demonstrate that, despite the formulaic form of some parts of these texts, they are a source which registers a considerable number of linguistic innovations in all areas (phonic, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic). In order to demonstrate it, the article deals with three deontic periphrasis with deber found in Documentos lingüísticos and another collections of Spanish notary documents.

Transkreacja w przekładzie melicznym:

Author(s): Olga Mastela / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Artykuł prezentuje analizę twórczych tłumaczeń melicznych pióra Wojciecha Młynarskiego przeprowadzoną w celu ukazania transkreacyjnego podejścia tego autora do przekładu wybranych piosenek francuskich wykonywanych oryginalnie przez Charles’a Aznavoura. Młynarski okazuje się być prawdziwym mistrzem transkreacji w rozumieniu tego pojęcia, jakie zaproponowane zostało w latach 60. XX wieku przez brazylijskiego uczonego i tłumacza, Haroldo de Camposa (1929–2003). W niniejszym artykule na przykładzie analizy kontrastywnej wybranych tekstów piosenek w ich wersjach oryginalnych i przekładach pióra Młynarskiego podjęto próbę pokazania, w jaki sposób na kanwie francuskich tekstów oraz muzyki polski poeta i szansonista stworzył nowe teksty często obfitujące w zupełnie inne aluzje kulturowe niż te obecne w wersjach oryginalnych. Zachowując dominantę meliczną piosenek, Młynarski modyfikował warstwę semantyczną w celu dostosowania utworów do odbiorców docelowych, co dowodzi, że był świadomy również wartości marketingowej swych tłumaczeń, a więc cechy branej pod uwagę także w dzisiejszym rozumieniu usługi transkreacyjnej jako celowej adaptacji, uwzględniającej realia społeczno-kulturowe oraz sferę emocjonalną docelowych odbiorców, a także specyfikę rynku docelowego. // The paper is devoted to the phenomenon of transcreations (creative re-writings) of selected French songs, made by the famous Polish songwriter Wojciech Młynarski (1941–2017). The artist seems to have been a true master of transcreation, if we understand the concept in the way suggested in the 1960s by a Brazilian scholar and translator, Haroldo de Campos (1929– 2003). In the present paper, on the example of contrastive analysis of selected lyrics in their original versions (performed by Charles Aznavour) and in Młynarski’s renderings, it is shown how on the basis of original French lyrics and music, the Polish songwriter created new texts often abounding in entirely different cultural allusions. Saving the melic dominant, Młynarski at the same time modified the content semantically in order to adapt the songs to the target audience, which proves that he was aware also of the importance of the translations’ marketability – a feature that is taken into account in the contemporary understanding of transcreation services.