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Żyśko, Konrad (2017). A Cognitive Linguistics Account of Wordplay. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
More...the case of “Big Night”
Multilingual films usually tackle significant social and political issues. Sometimes, these filmsadopt linguistic diversity to create confusion and to trigger humour, accomplishing a comiceffect. Normally, films about migration and diaspora are multilingual, as they want to recreatethe linguistic diversity that exists in reality. There are many cases though in which thetranslator/adapter faces the struggle of translating into his/her own language. In this paper,we will analyse the Italian dubbing of Big Night, to see how the dialogues have been conveyedand especially how verbally expressed humour and stereotypes from the Italian language andculture are transferred intralingually and to what effect.
More...Modern Family dubbed in Italian
Audiovisual productions are increasingly featuring multi-ethnic communities which also reflect today’s globalised world. Characters in both films and TV series are often depicted as having a bilingual background and heavily relying on code-switching to express their bicultural identity (Monti 2016: 69). As such, this phenomenon poses important challenges for its translation, especially when dubbing is involved. Using this audiovisual translation (AVT) mode involves a necessary technical manipulation (Díaz-Cintas 2012: 284–285). As for Italian dubbing, multilingualism has often undergone a process of neutralization (Pavesi 2005: 56) or local standardization (Ulrych 2000: 410), although recent dubbed films have proved to be geared towards a more faithful rendering of this important feature of the source text (Monti 2016: 90). It should be borne in mind that contextual factors, such as genres, may play a fundamental role in deciding whether to retain or neutralise multilingualism in AVT, especially when it is used for humorous purposes. In those cases, the perlocutionary function of the ST should be considered (Hickey 1998; cf. also Zabalbeascoa 2012: 322). Comedy can make use of multilingualism to entertain and the American mockumentary (or docucomedy) Modern Family (Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, 2009–2019), is a striking example in this sense. It follows the lives of Jay Pritchett and his family in suburban Los Angeles. Linguistically speaking, the most interesting character is Jay’s second wife Gloria Delgado, a young and beautiful Colombian woman who often code-switches or code-mixes English and Spanish (with a marked Colombian accent), thus creating moments of pure comedy. Hence, this study investigates how Gloria’s humorous and multilingual persona has been transferred into Italian. The analysis confirms the current tendency of Italian dubbing to render otherness in the TT (Monti 2016: 89). This may be justified by the genre and scope of the programme, that allow for a more innovative transfer of vehicular matching via what I propose to call functional manipulation.
More...transmetic and intertextual puns in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation “P” and its translations
Babylen Tatarsky, the protagonist in Russian writer Viktor Pelevin’s novel Generation “P”(translated into English by Andrew Bromfield as Homo Zapiens), works to adapt Americanadvertisements for the Russian market and witnesses how the reality of Russia’s tumultuous1990s is replaced by a consumer-driven television simulation. Puns in the advertising slogansthat Tatarsky translates, interspersed throughout the novel, are central to its plot. Some of thesepuns exhibit greater sophistication than others: in addition to utilizing homonymy, homophony,homography, paronymy, and polysemy, they involve transmesis, multilingualism, andintertextuality. This article compares how Pelevin’s translators (English, German, Polish,Spanish, and French) approached these difficult puns. The objective of this comparative analysisis to demonstrate how the intertext(s) evoked through wordplay may, on the one hand, impedetranslation, but, on the other, open avenues for creative solutions, by producing new traces andechoes of meaning that make the act of translation possible. The issues raised by the varioustranslations point to a need to re-examine the roles and tasks of the translator and underscorethe importance of keeping the (un)translatability debate open. Ultimately, this article aims tocontribute to the ongoing reconceptualization of what literary translation is and, especially,what it does: with texts, readers, literatures, and, above all, with language.
More...Kohlke, Marie-Luise & Gutleben, Christian (eds.) (2017). Neo-Victorian Humour. Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions. Neo-Victorian Series 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi.
More...developing the “countersign” model
A semiology-based approach to understanding humour is being developed and an interpretation of humour as a “counter-sign,” a two-faced sign within the space of conventionality, is put forward. The range of core attributes to interpret the phenomenon of humour is determined. The concepts of the “frame of significance,” “conventionality,” and “meta-communicative marker of conventionality” are elaborated. The general definition of humour is being formulated as a “sign-based identification of non-identifiable signs within the space of conventionality.” An outline is put forward to enable the formal distinction between satire, humour, irony, and jokes. The following questions are addressed: “Why does that which is funny cease to be so if it is repeated many times?”, “Why can the terrifying become funny when recollected?” “Why is the state of bewilderment not always funny but returning to it in one’s thoughts triggers laughter?”
More...on the fragment of Origen’s treatise “Contra Celsum” 7.53-58
In the article we investigate the Christian –pagan polemic of Origen’s treatise “Contra Celsum”in fragment 7.53-58, where the problem of the correlation of irony and heroism reveals the contrast between false and true deeds, for which divine honours are given. The irony that Celsus uses to attack Christians serves as a kind of “divide” that marks acontrast between pagan ideas about heroism, as a principle of deification of people, and the principles on which, from Celsus’ point of view of, Christians consider Jesus to be God. A special subject of the article is Celsus’ reflection on the ironic motive of the Book of Jonah, the story of the gourd (Jonah 4, 5-11), and the salvation of the prophet Daniel from the lion's den (Dan. 6, 16-23). Origen’s response to Celsus’ speech shows a certain similarity to the text of a pagan author in structural, stylistic and lexical aspects. Such factor reveals a rhetorical content of the response of Origen. In the field of rhetorica, Origen uses irony against his opponent: pagan heroes and philosophers now appear funny or not serious enough, whereas the Old Testamentprophets are revealed as genuinely great and as a source of miracles. In light of this, Origen’s response to Celsus replaces Celsus’ ironic allusion to the gourd story from the fourth chapter of the Book of Jonah with the first verse of the second chapter, which opens the episode of Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale. An analysis of this substitution, based on the hermeneutic principles of Origen, shows the role of Biblical irony as a specific aspect of the spiritual meaning of the sacred text. It is hypothesized that the essence of this specificity is the creation of a contrast that sets any feat of any person in the light of the historical life of Jesus Christ, who completely and exceptionally realized God’s providence. This reveals a pattern or principle of going beyond the limits of human virtue to the sphere of divine being. To compare any feats with the earthly life and the death of the Saviour renders the opposition of ironic and heroic no longer a contrast between false and true: any heroism, even the exploits of the Old Testament prophets, becomes ironic / ridiculous. Thus Origen’s Christian irony is not only an instrument of rhetorical discourse, but a philosophical and literary device that allows transcending, or elevating to an unattainable level, the heroism of the life and death of the Saviour.
More...Leonor Ruiz-Gurillo (ed.) (2016), Metapragmatics of Humour: Current Research Trends. IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 14. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 309 pp.
More...Oring, Elliott (2016). Joking Asides: The Theory, Analysis, and Aesthetics of Humour. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 283 pages.
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This paper argues in favour of considering humour and laughter as embodied signs of the ancient, sympathetic, figurative mode of the human mind, still working with us in dance, music, singing and literary activity. Starting from steady evolutionary provisos, both the continuity and the departing lines between nonhuman vocalisations and human laughter are considered. Along the Duchenne and non-Duchenne expression types, we analyse the developmental extension of laughter, both social and cognitive, probably under complex imitative forms through millennia until the emergence of articulated languages. Then, we try to explain the particular attachment of humour and laughter to evolutionary achievements in the symbolic domain. Thus, from a cognitive and semiotic framework, here it is argued that the old signal of play and joy might have evolved on a par with full connectivity and unbounded associations promoted by symbolic activity, clinging to new meanings and abilities, but still governed by the conjoined social work of sanction and solidarity, a pattern that humour shows all over around. As a particular reflex of ancient multimodality, laughter (with humour) seems akin to participative, mythical modes of thinking that were in full force and effect at the beginning of human societies, rooted in metaphors and figurativeness. Since both humour and laughter still find their way in the contemporary contexts of free associations, human projections and extended agentivity, they could be properly considered as the embodied, old counterpart of the imaginative dimension of symbolic activity.
More...Plester, Barbara (2016). The Complexity of Workplace Humour: Laughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour. London & New York: Springer, 164 pp.
More...Brône G., Feyaerts, K. and Veale, T. (eds.) (2015). Cognitive Linguistics and Humour. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 248 pp.
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Review of: Pranjković, Ivo. 2021. Gramatičke graničnosti. Zagreb: Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, 193 str. ISBN 9789531694667
More...Dynel, Marta (2013). Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 425 pp.
More...Hidden seeds of wisdom in the English and Croatian proverbial apples
In the paper we analyse humorous modified proverbs in light of the theory of conceptual integration. Unlike traditional proverbs, which teach us something and elucidate some aspects of human life, modified proverbs are here primarily to entertain us. The theory of conceptual integration is particularly suitable for the interpretation of modified proverbs since they present novel structures that are not part of our mental lexicon and which we need to interpret online in dynamic meaning construction. Our examples of humorous modified proverbs show that although jokes are verbalised in the form of proverbs, the humour is derived from the same mechanisms that are employed in other types of verbal humour: puns, play on words, metonymies, elements of surprise, exploitation of taboos, etc. The evidence for this is found in the fact that those modified proverbs that employ only some of these elements, or do not employ any of them, are found to be less humorous or not humorous at all.
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Celem niniejszego artykułu jest analiza leksemu płaskoziemiec w języku polskim pod kątem jego znaczenia słownikowego i użyć korpusowych oraz ich wzajemnych relacji. Autor na wstępie przedstawia różnice formalne w budowie wyrazu w języku polskim, angielskim i serbskim, aby na tej podstawie przejść do różnic semantycznych zachodzących w obrębie zarysowanego obszaru badawczego. Następnie zaś praca stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, w jaki sposób użytkownicy analizowanych języków konceptualizują badany wyraz oraz na ile jest to determinowane przez styl wypowiedzi i jej charakterystykę gatunkowa. W tym celu zebrany materiał poddano analizie profilowej według modelu zaproponowanego przez Annę Wierzbicką i Jerzego Bartmińskiego. W badaniu wzięto pod uwagę zmienne wartości konotacyjne leksemu i sposoby jego wartościowania w konkretnych użyciach kontekstowych. Praca zwraca uwagę na to, w jakim stopniu kwestie zewnętrznojęzykowe, takie jak polityka, społeczeństwo i kultura wpływają na modyfikację znaczeniową leksemu w różnych kręgach językowych. // The aim of this article is to analyze the meaning of the lexeme flat-earther in the Polish language. In order to achieve this objective, this study investigates differences in the way this word is conceptualized by native speakers in Polish, English and Serbian languages. The analysis was performed in accordance with the method of profiling introduced by Anna Wierzbicka and Jerzy Bartmiński. Based on that, author concluded that the linguistic picture of this lexeme, its emotional values and possible connotation are determined by social, political and cultural circumstances.
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Radical communication largely characterizes W. H. Gass’s The Tunnel. The novel incorporates many forms of radical speech and thought, it unfolds a number of radically charged issues of public and private life. It features a multitude of innovative experimental techniques and, in many instances, it demonstrates predominance of language and form over the content. In this paper, we have ascertained that the authenticity and multitude of radical communication forms in the said novel can essentially be grasped in terms of disjointing the Ich-Erzähler’s narrative voice and the authorial one. It has been ascertained that the sincerity in narrative largely governs its radical content while the book’s radical composition and radical language and style form the second set of the radical communication styles in the novel, reflecting Gass’s bent on experimental fiction. In the paper, the following radical communication style varieties have been singled out: “breaking the narrative monotony,” “hate intensifying,” “filial unwillingness to forgive,” “revulsion invoking,” “provoking indecipherability/unreadability,” “accentuated total criticism,” or “downgrading metanarratives,” “ambivalent portrayal of the war and Holocaust,” “pictorial communication style,” “communication style of radically structured composition,” “communication style of verbal adornment,” “embellishment,” “conceit” (as a figure of speech).
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