Pun

10 Key excerpts on "Pun"

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  Stylistics and Shakespeare's Language

  Transdisciplinary Approaches

  • Mireille Ravassat, Jonathan Culpeper(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  It causes language to bend back upon itself, reminding us that meaning comes from language and that languages have their own stubborn ways of putting things. Last but not least, for all their dependence on the structural properties of the language system as recorded in grammars and dictionaries, Puns are discursive phenomena. This means that Puns exist as language-in-action. They occur in concrete utterances, and their meanings and effects depend crucially on their interplay with many specific factors – the surrounding text, genre conventions, pragmatic rules and contexts, intertextual networks, ideologies, psychological dispositions and so on – which condition mean-ing-formation at both the point of production and the point of reception. The fact that the two points of production and reception are so far removed from each other with older writers such as Shakespeare makes it doubly important to adopt a strictly historical and context-sensitive approach. 3. Areas of transition As we have just suggested, there are no context-free Puns floating free in abstracto . Puns exist in discourses, or they don’t exist at all. This part at least of the definition given above leaves no room for doubt or disagreement. But for all the other criteria that make up the definition, it is possible and indeed unavoidable to describe Puns in terms of degrees to which they meet its several conditions. In this way, wordplay turns out to be gradually 144 Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language different from various sets of other, more or less related, discursive phe-nomena, rather than constituting a totally autonomous and homogeneous domain. In this sense we could see wordplay and its various types in terms of prototypical categories.

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  Advertising Language

  A Pragmatic Approach to Advertisements in Britain and Japan

  • Keiko Tanaka(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Puns thus raise the awkward problem of ‘the presence of ambiguity in language’. According to Collins English Language Dictionary (1987:1164), a Pun can be defined as ‘a use of words that have more than one meaning, or words that have the same sound but different meanings, so that what you say has two different meanings and makes people laugh’. When a word has several meanings, one speaks of homonyms. When several words sound the same, they are called homophones (Culler 1988:4–5). Homophones and homonyms can be whole phrases rather than single words, and similarities between words and phrases do not have to be absolute to have the ambiguous effect of a Pun (Nash 1985:137–47). As discussed in Chapter 2, it is necessary to distinguish unresolvable ambiguity from mere underdeterminacy, which is far more frequently encountered. The success of communication depends on the hearer's recovery of the speaker's intended interpretation, and not merely on her recognition of its linguistic meaning (Sperber and Wilson 1986a:23). So communication can succeed when there is more than one possible interpretation of the utterance, as long as the speaker's intended interpretation is recoverable. Underdetermined utterances are so ubiquitous in ordinary communication that it is difficult to find any utterance which does not require some degree of disambiguation, reference assignment or enrichment. However, any such underdeterminacy is almost invariably resolved in context. In contrast, there are cases in which the hearer is unable to identify the interpretation intended by the speaker, and such unrecoverable ambiguity is called equivocation. An utterance becomes equivocal when the hearer is unable to assign it a single intended interpretation. Such utterances are then interpreted as ambiguous, and the hearer has to seek clarification in order to recover the speaker's intention

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  The Game of Humor

  A Comprehensive Theory of Why We Laugh

  • Charles R. Gruner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  play is a Game to be Won, Too.

  A Pun is the lowest form of wit. —John Dennis

  A Pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first. —Oscar Levant

  What we call a Pun , the Greeks had a word for: paronomasia , or, roughly translated, “equal word.” As Lederer (1988, 1990) points out, there are three major types of Puns: the homograph, the homophone, and the double-sound Pun.

  The homograph (Greek: “same writing”) employs a word or words with two or more meanings. The multiple meanings are represented by the same word, spelled the same way:

  Who was the first man to bear arms? Adam. He had two. How did Samson die? From fallen arches. The young woman wished her boyfriend would give her a ring. Show me Nixon’s grave and I’ll show you a Republican plot.

  Here we have “arms” standing for both human appendages and weapons ; “arches” standing for both foot structure and architectural support ; “ring” meaning telephone call and engagement ring ; and “plot” meaning both burial site and scheme .

  The homophone (Greek: “same sound”) combines two words of different meanings and spellings but which sound alike.

  What is black and white and red (read) all over? A newspaper. A bloody zebra. A young man with a squeaking shoe decided to become a songwriter since he had music in his sole.

  A tourist from Czechoslovakia was killed in an auto accident in the United States. His remains were cremated and sent home via parcel post. His immediate family was wired the message: “The Czech is in the mail.”

  The “double-sound Pun” can be more complicated. It can be a word that Puns on a Pun . Richard Lederer gives us one in the title of his book, Get Thee to a Punnery . “Punnery” is a Pun on “nunnery” which, again, is a Pun on Hamlet’s use of “nunnery” which could, in his time, mean either a “house of ill ref

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  The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes

  • Graeme Ritchie(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 The structure of Puns

  We review a range of jokes involving phonetic similarity, and offer a structural definition which describes a substantial class of these jokes.

  9.1 Puns

  One of the simplest forms of joke is the Pun, often known as a ‘play on words’. It is this very simplicity which makes Puns of interest here. As argued in Chapter 1 , it is a useful first step (in the quest for an understanding of humorous phenomena) to be able to set down some ‘abstract syntax’ for a class of jokes, thereby clearing the ground for further investigation of how that class of jokes is used and why they are or are not funny. (See Attardo (1994: Section 3.4 ) for some further reasons for studying Puns.) Here, we will attempt to find some principles which describe the basic structure of Puns in English.

  Puns are (at least within English-speaking culture) a very widespread and commonplace form of spontaneous humour. Whereas funny stories such as (18 ) or (62 ) are not normally created on the spur of the moment in ordinary social interaction, Puns – albeit not very funny ones – are made quite freely. This may, of course, be another consequence of the structural simplicity of Puns – anyone can build one:

  It is the easy availability of Puns which makes them a cheap and somewhat despicable type of humor for many individuals and social groups. (Raskin 1985: 141)

  This means that an analysis of Punning should take us (very slightly) beyond the limitations of studying only ‘canned’ jokes, i.e. jokes which are recounted in a relatively fixed textual form with little or no connection to the context.

  Many Puns, perhaps the majority, are not very funny. There is even a widely established habit of groaning in response to a Pun rather than laughing. This is yet another empirical phenomenon which we will not be able to explain unless we take the first step of defining what constitutes a Pun.

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  Crossing Languages to Play with Words

  • Sebastian Knospe, Alexander Onysko, Maik Goth(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Thus, bilingual Punning is also a prac-tical resource for the participants with limited linguistic resources. By making a bilingual Pun, a participant can also display understanding and present them-selves as linguistically competent. Both the participants who do not and those who do speak both languages can engage in sharing linguistic knowledge via bilingual Punning. As Puns draw close attention to language and the local context, it is no wonder that we discovered most Puns in metalinguistic sequences. The data showed how bilin-gual Puns can be used in metalinguistic reflection and for creating shared voca-bulary in two different ways: by initiating the activity of teaching and learning new vocabulary, and by organizing what is being learned. Punning can thus contribute to creating common ground and to enhancing an individual’s lan-guage skills. In linguistically asymmetric situations, Puns are useful for indicating prob-lems in understanding. They can be used to pick out a word that one does not understand and make that word laughable by making a Pun in the form of a mock translation or a repair initiator. Humor is a means of sharing positive af-fects while simultaneously fulfilling one’s serious interactional needs. It can be used to indicate a problem source and express a related affect at the same time. When doing so, the delicacy of the matter is being treated as well (see Haakana 2001). 7 References Adamczyk, Magdalena 2011. Context-sensitive aspects of Shakespeare’s use of Puns in come-dies. An enquiry into clowns’ and pages’ Punning practices. In Marta Dynel (ed.), The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains , 105–124. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Alexander, Richard. 1997. Aspects of Verbal Humour in English. Tübingen: Narr. Alvre Paul & Raul Vodja. 1993. Pulma poikineen: Virolais-suomalainen vertailusanakirja [Esto-nian-Finnish comparative dictionary]. Porvoo: Wsoy. Auer, Peter. 1995. The pragmatics of code-switching.

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  The Language of Comic Narratives

  Humor Construction in Short Stories

  • Isabel Ermida(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The following survey is a brief inquiry into these manipulations, from which I wish to show how and why (or why not) language-dependent humor works. Similar surveys, albeit of a more succinct and superficial nature, already exist in the literature (cf. e.g. Chiaro 1992 and Ross 1998). Notwithstanding, my purpose here is to elaborate on the linguistic concepts at stake in these and other surveys, investigate their origins and theoretical implications, and establish relationships between them, paving the way for my analysis of similar mechanisms in literary context (Ch. 6 and 7). 42 Linguistic resources of humor 1. Sound 1.1. The phonetic Pun I have been waiting since 1948 for some poor devil to ask, “What does a woman want most in a man?” so that I can come back, quick as a flash, with “Fiscal attraction.” (Peter de Vries, Laughter in the Basement ) One of the most prolific resources of verbal humor is sound, which can take such different forms as homophony, juncture, sound symbolism, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and rhythm. Among these, the Pun stands out as being quite close to the very definition of humor. In the rhetorical tradition, the Pun is called ‘paronomasia’, meaning “a form of speech play in which a word or a phrase unexpectedly and simultaneously combines two unrelated meanings” (cf. Sherzer 1978: 336). This is not far from the idea that humor consists of incompatible elements brought together. The origin of the word is uncertain, but it is likely to be an abbreviation of Italian Puntiglio , small or fine point, formerly also a cavil or a quibble (cf. Bates 1999). In the present case, Puns based on sound can explore two mechanisms: first, homophonic words , i.e. words with similar pronunciations but different spellings and meanings (on homophony see Ermida [1998: 49–50] and refer-ences therein). As the epigraph shows, entirely distinct, but phonetically similar, lexemes ( fiscal/physical ) lend themselves to humorous games.

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  Thomas Hood and nineteenth-century poetry

  Work, play, and politics

  • Sara Lodge(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Objections to Puns in general, and to Hood's Puns in particular, have been many and various. It is worth pausing briefly to consider this history of ‘groaning’ when someone ostentatiously ‘lets’ (like a fart), ‘discharges’ (like a firearm) or ‘commits’ (like a felony) a Pun, because it conveys much about what is represented by the act of Punning and about Hood's conscious determination to Pun in the face of polite prejudice. At the roots of opposition to Punning, as Jonathan Culler posits, may lie concern that the Pun exposes the essential instability and provisionality of all communication systems:

  Speakers of English tend to think of the single, self-identical sound sequence correlated with a distinct idea – the word – as the norm or essence of language, from which all else derives, and thus of homonyms, ambiguities, and so on as exceptions. This is, of course, an illusion … Puns present us with a model of language as phonemes or letters combining in various ways to evoke prior meaning and to produce effects of meaning – with a looseness, unpredictability, excessiveness, shall we say, that cannot but disrupt the model of language as nomenclature.11

  The term ‘Pun’ embraces various figures depending on similarity of form and disparity of meaning.12 Much scholarly engagement with the Pun has involved attempts to classify Puns by type and to separate them from other forms of wordplay. Such attempts at definition, however, betray their own anxiety surrounding the loss of definition that the Pun exposes.

  From a neurological point of view it appears that Punning associations are repressed, probably during the period of language acquisition when children are taught to prioritize ‘meaningful’ associations of words based on ideational content rather than visual or aural similarity. Tellingly, when frontal lobe activity, which plays a key role in editing verbal output, is damaged, then Puns frequently spill out:

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  The Primer of Humor Research

  • Victor Raskin(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  346 Christian F. Hempelmann The only SOp that this text could be conceived of carrying is that of a meta-joke (cf� Attardo 2001), not local antonymy of cantaloupe and the inability to elope can be found� In sum, if a Pun in a text is too different in sound from the target to fulfill function (6a), the Punning joke fails completely, no humor is created, the text is not a joke, and, if the attempt to joke has been detected, the teller will probably be prompted to supply additional explanations to make the target recoverable� But if the Pun and target are sufficiently similar in sound for the latter to be recovered, the text may be perceived as a joke� But more crucially, two scripts triggered by the Pun-target pair (SOv) may still lack opposition, so that the SOp requirement (8) is not fulfilled, and the cratylistic analogy will not function� Accordingly, in humorous Punning, in addition to the overlap in sound of the Pun-target segment, there needs to be semantic opposition, if of the feeblest kind imaginable, to support the cratylistic LM� Otherwise the Pun-ning text will not be a joke� For those who fail to see the overlap, it indeed isn’t a joke, but merely wordplay� 12 And given that humans are desperately good disambiguators with vast semantic networks available to them, as well as excellent pragmatic interpreters, we seek any kind of semantic overlap to be able to handle the phonological (quasi-)ambiguity as humor, even if mere wordplay was intended� What adds to the confusion is that non-humorous wordplay, like rhyming, can be enjoyed aesthetically, and this enjoyment can be confused with the enjoyment derived from humor� In sum, Punning includes “word play,” but play with words cannot work at the sound level alone as mere “Klangspiel” (play with sounds), if it strives to be humor as well� But it must be accompanied by “Sinnspiel” (play with meaning; cf�

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  Renaissance Figures of Speech

  • Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, Katrin Ettenhuber(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The process of recovery is far from straightforward. There is, to begin with, no very exact correspondence between the nomenclature of the rhetoricians and the slang terms – ‘quibble’, ‘clench’, ‘catch’, and above all ‘Pun’ itself – that coexisted with and then supplanted it. The difference is one of precision, and of prestige. While to deploy the figure of antana- clasis and to quibble on a word are, in effect, more or less the same thing, it is clear that if what a writer conceives of and intends as the former is thought of by a reader as the latter, an interpretative fissure has opened: the flowers of rhetoric evidently do not smell as sweet by any other names. The situation is complicated further by a lack of consensus among the rhetoricians themselves as to what constitutes which device: to distinguish and provide working definitions for the three main rhetorical figures which constitute the Pun is a necessary, but necessarily inexact, act of restitution. 4 Syllepsis is a case in point; though the term is only arguably understood to mean a particular kind of wordplay in the Renaissance, no alternative designation exists. This chapter, following Sister Miriam Joseph’s influen- tial example, will take it to refer to the type of Pun where a single word or sound has two meanings, both of which are operated by the context either to complementary or ironic effect. 5 When Othello cries ‘O perjur’d woman, thou do’st stone my heart’, for example, he intends a lament about Puns 83 the injuries Desdemona’s supposed infidelity inflicts on him: his heart is battered, stoned, the fate marked out for the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of St John. 6 He also, however, describes the consequence of this perception on his resolve: his heart is become stone, hardened to its murderous purpose.

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  Wordplay and Metalinguistic / Metadiscursive Reflection

  Authors, Contexts, Techniques, and Meta-Reflection

  • Angelika Zirker, Esme Winter-Froemel, Angelika Zirker, Esme Winter-Froemel(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Spiegel examples, can be illustrated by the Pun

  (11)	MISS-Stimmung (Stefanowitsch 2002 : 68)

  Example (11) is taken from a journal article on conflicts between the female participants during a Miss World contest. It Puns on the German noun Missstimmung ‘(atmosphere full of) discord,’ which contains the negative prefix miss- [mI s] (spelt miß- before the German orthographic reform), and the Anglicism Miss [mI s].155 Yet, even this example underlines that the authors often use additional means such as hyphens or capitalization to signal that a double meaning is intended. To put it differently: bilingual Puns in written language use typically involve a combination of a play with sounds and spelling plus additional typographic means in order to indicate the Pun (cf. also Alexander 1997 : 21; Renner, this volume). These manipulations represent problem spots which, on reflection, open structural access points leading to the deciphering of the code blend and the double meaning of the Pun behind this surface form.

  With this statement, we have left the realm of a primarily structurally oriented description which considers the resulting form only. A structural approach, after all, is rather static, since it eclipses the complex processing at play in bilingual Punning. In fact, to arrive at a sensible interpretation, the recipients have to follow specific paths and are, at least partly, directed in this by Punsters anticipating the addressees’ interpretative needs.

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