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.

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.

Funny as hell:

Author(s): Uğur Ümit Üngör,Valerie Amandine Verkerke / Language(s): English Issue: 2/3/2015

The history of genocide is replete with various humorous treatments by different actors with distinctive objectives. This type of dark humour treats the topic, which is usually enveloped with solemnity, in a satirical manner. This essay aims to study the functions of humour by comparatively examining victimized individuals’ and groups’ use of humour during and after violent episodes such as genocide. Why do victims use humour under conditions of extreme peril, threats to life, and fear? It draws on published and unpublished memoirs, pamphlets, video clips, and most importantly victims' artistic and literary responses to the Nazi repression and the mass violence in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Syria (2011-2013). The essay argues that dark humour seems to be widespread among victims and survivors, as it functions as a complex mechanism for coping with anxiety and fear, group cohesion and critique of perpetrators. Our conclusions suggest that victimological approaches in genocide studies can benefit considerably from focusing on oppressed groups’ humoristic responses to mass violence.

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.

Clowns, buffoons and the killing laugh:

Author(s): Hilary Ramsden / Language(s): English Issue: 2/3/2015

This essay offers an experiential account of the development of “rebel clowning” as a practice that emerged in the context of the anti-globalisation movements in the UK, bringing together the ancient art of clowning and more recent practices of non-violent direct action. The essay traces the legacies of rebel clowning, outlines the tactics and strategies that comprise its humour, and analyses key activist moments in its trajectory in the first decade of the 21st century. By inserting the logic of clowning into the activist realm, the essay argues, the tired binary between protester and authority, or activists and their opponents, is shaken and cheerfully disrupted.

Not quiet on the Tasman front?

Author(s): Steven Loveridge / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2014

There is a fascinating idiosyncrasy within New Zealand cartoonist’s depiction of Australia during the Great War. Running parallel to comradely images of fresh-faced ANZACs marching together, New Zealand cartoonists produced acrimonious sketches of their neighbour and ally as dysfunctional and even disloyal. These representations might be considered as charting the limits of neighbourly sentiments and good-natured humour. This article surveys the context, in history and humour, behind these depictions and questions how they fit within the wider panorama of New Zealand’s war effort and the humorous irreverence conventionally considered to be a key aspect of the trans-Tasman relationship.

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.

Критерии за оценка на ЕМС и защита от смущения на основни радиослужби в съответствие с препоръките на ITU-R

Author(s): Anushka Stancheva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 7/2020

The effect of unwanted energy due to one or a combination of several desired and unwanted emissions upon reception in a radio communication system results in performance degradation, misinterpretation or loss of information. Multiple sources of interference may affect the receiver input: services of the same type or other operating in the same frequency band, services operating in adjacent frequency bands, sources generating continuous or short term interferences, fixed or mobile sources, etc. To prevent such interfering situations, a key element is the standardization of appropriate criteria for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and interference protection (IPC). The purpose of the studies and analyzes in this article is to systematize the criteria for electromagnetic compatibility for basic radio services based on the Publications of ITU-R. Criteria for four important areas of radio communications covering fixed, fixed satellite, broadcasting and mobile radio services are compared. Contributions are the categorization of the criteria according to the type of interfering signal and the results of the analyses, which show that the regulatory requirements and practical methods for interference protection and EMC for different radio services differ. Detailed criteria for predicting the probability of interference being standardized only for some radio services.

Отражение от влизането на България в еврозоната за банковия и за реалния сектори в Република България и в частност за отрасъл „Телекомуникации“

Author(s): Joseph Avramov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 7/2020

The publication analyzes the advantages of the entry of the Republic of Bulgaria into the ERM 2 currency mechanism and the banking union. The first part indicates the benefits for our country for the banking sector of the Bulgarian economy, respectively for facilitating the payments of companies and citizens. The second part of the publication refers to the advantages for the real sector of the Bulgarian economy, respectively for the Telecommunications sector. In conclusion, some not very significant shortcomings are indicated, which will occur after Bulgaria's accession to the euro area

The Role of Agents of Political Socialization in the Use of Social Media

Author(s): Savaş TOKSÖZ / Language(s): English Issue: 74/2021

This study aims to reveal the role of the agents of political socialization in the use of social media as a tool for receiving political news and political participation. The research findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between the use of social media as a tool for receiving political news and the agents of political socialization, namely, the family, friend groups, school, and traditional media. Similarly, a statistically significant relationship has been found between the use of social media as a tool for political participation and family, friend groups, school, and traditional media.