Volume 03 Issue 12-2023
74
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
12
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:
74-80
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FACTOR
(2022:
5.
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(2023:
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OCLC
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1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
ABSTRACT
In this article we provide information about the phenomenon “wordplay”. More
over, the phonological and
graphological structure and analysis of it is presented. Wordplay can be employed among friends as well as in media.
The aim of wordplay here is to capture the reader’s or viewer’s attention via the unusual formulations used in t
he titles
of the newspaper articles or in the news on television.
KEYWORDS
Wordplay, pun, phonological structure, humour, paronymy, homonymy.
INTRODUCTION
Wordplay is a frequent and common phenomenon and
an inseparable part of communication. Delabastita
(1997, 1-2) describ
es wordplay as “a deliberate
communicative strategy, or the result thereof, used
with a specific semantic or pragmatic effect in mind”.
Wordplay can be employed among friends as well as in
media. The aim of wordplay here is to capture the
reader’s or viewer’s attention via the unusual
formulations used in the titles of the newspaper
articles or in the news on television.
As mentioned above, wordplay is often related to
humour. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
provides the definition of wordplay in which the aspect
of humour is already included: Wordplay - making jokes
by using words in a clever or amusing way, especially
by using a word that has two meanings, or different
Research Article
WORDPLAY AS A TOOL CONVEYING HUMOUR
Submission Date:
December 04, 2023,
Accepted Date:
December 09, 2023,
Published Date:
December 14, 2023
Crossref doi:
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume03Issue12-12
Saidova Iroda Anvar kizi
Doctoral student, Tashkent state University of Uzbek Language and Literature named after Alisher Navoi,
Uzbekistan
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
Volume 03 Issue 12-2023
75
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
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2771-2273)
VOLUME
03
ISSUE
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74-80
SJIF
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(2022:
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(2023:
6.
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OCLC
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1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
words that sound the same Nevertheless, the success
of a joke is affected by various factors.
With the aim of denoting a new meaning. The game
techniques of verbal decomposition of stable
combinations are based on the selection of a well-
known
stable
combination
and
its
further
recompanisation and its fragment or the whole
construction with the help of by means of various
types of substitutions, truncations or contaminations
based on phonetic or syntactic connection.
In Le Petit Robert's dictionary, a wordplay is a
humorous innuendo based on the ambiguity created
by words that are phonetically similar but contrast in
meaning phonetically similar but contrasting in
meaning.
LITERATURE REVIEW
In Russian linguistic, wordplay is considered as a
component of the phenomenon of language play,
thoroughly studied in the works of Е.M. Aleksa
ndrova,
O.E.Voronichev,
T.A.Gridina,
O.V.Zalesova,
O.S.Zubkova, E.I.Kumanitsyna, G.V.Rakhimkulova,
V.Z.Sannikov, O.A.Shishkareva and others.
The term wordplay remains controversial in the
scientific literature. As applied to the present work, the
closest interpretation of language game is the one
developed by E.I.Kumanitsyna as "conscious variation
of linguistic signs and transformation of linguistic
forms, creating non-trivial new language forms
transformation of linguistic forms, creating non-trivial
new linguistic units in order to influence the society"
Investigating the model of the mechanism of word play
V. S. Vinogradov suggested about its two-component
nature, where the first component is the basis, and the
second - "result" (a word or word combination) - a
"shifter" which becomes a favourable ground for
creation of individual-author neologisms. Wordplay
occurs only when the "resulta" is realized in speech and
mentally correlated with the base, which can be
perceived in a wider context or even only implied [5, p.
153-154].
One of them is the environment in which it is uttered.
The joke-teller must consider the cultural, political,
social and other backgrounds of the environment in
which he/she occurs. Chiaro (1992, 15) explains: […]
not everydiv is amused by the same things, and what
is more, over and above shared knowledge of
whatever type, finding something funny relies on a
number of subjective variables. What may appear
amusing under the influence of a few drinks may not
appear quite so funny in the cold light of the morning
after. A homosexual is hardly going to enjoy being
insulted by someone’s idea of a witty remark at his or
her expense, any more than the Irish are amused by the
thousands of jokes which depict them as imbeciles.
Some people are offended by sexual innuendo, while
others by political references contained in a joke.
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There are different ways to produce wordplay. Almost
every linguistic phenomenon possible is used
–
not
only lexical means such as idioms and polysemy, but
also grammar or phonetics. Delabastita (1996, 130)
suggests the following categorization, according to
the linguistic means used to achieve wordplay:
• Phonological and graphological structure
• Lexical structure (polysemy)
• Lexical structure (idiom)
• Morphologica
l structure
• Syntactic structure
Discussion. Delabastita (1996, 131) also claims that
“often two or more of the above features of language
are harnessed simultaneously in order to obtain one
single pun.” Sometimes it can be very hard to decide to
which category the given wordplay should be
classified.
Phonological and graphological structure. The number
of phonemes and graphemes in a language is limited.
Moreover, each language has its rules according to
which they can be employed and so they can create
only certain combinations. Delabastita (1996, 130) uses
the term ‘sound
-
play’ which “ borders on alliteration,
assonance and consonance”. He goes on to say that “
in sound-play sound provides the basis for the verbal
association, whereas anagrammatic wordplay is based
on spelling.” As an example of sound
-play, Delabastita
provides: ( 1 ) Love at first bite. The sentence in ( 1 ) is
based on the expression love at first sight in whoch the
noun sight was replaced by its paronym, i.e. a word
whose pronunciation is very similar.
Paronymy. According to Attardo (1994, 110-
111) “two
words
are
paronyms
when
their
phonemic
representations are similar but not identical.”
Nevertheless, this definition is not complete. Let me
provide a more complex definition provided by Marcu
(2010, 202) who claims that “in linguistic
s, paronym
may refer to: a word related to another word and
derived from the same root - e.g. cognate words; this
types of paronyms often lead to confusion” or “words
almost homonyms but having slight differences in
spelling or pronunciation
–
different prefixes or
suffixes and added word syllables can change stress
and elements of pronunciation - and having different
meanings.” By way of illustration, Marcu (2010, 203)
suggests the examples of law and low or breath and
breathe.
Homonymy. Apart from ‘true homonymy’, i.e. words
whose phonological and graphological structure
match, there are two more types of homonymy to be
distinguished: homophony and homography.
Homophony is a type of homonymy in which two
words are identical in pronunciation, but different in
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spelling. Meyer et al. (2005, 149) provides the example
of [θru:] signifying either through or threw.
Homography. While homophones are words with an
identical pronunciation and a different spelling,
homographs are the opposite. Peprník (2001, 33) offers
the word lead as an illustrative example. It can be
understood either as a verb meaning “to go with or in
front of a person or an animal to show the way or to
make them go in the right direction” (OALD) or “a
chemical element. Lead is a heavy soft grey metal, used
especially in the past for water pipes or to cover roofs”
(OALD). The pronunciation in the first meaning is [li:d]
whereas in the second meaning it is pronounced as
[led].
Homonymy vs. polysemy While senses of a
homonymous word are not related, in case of
polysemy, arguably, they are. Peprník (2001, 26) inserts
the distinction between polysemy and homonymy into
his definition of polysemy: Polysemy, i.e. having two or
more meanings, that is referring to two or more items
of extralinguistic reality, but at the same time sharing
at least one element of meaning
–
without this link, the
shared meaning, it would be a case of homonymy The
difference is illustrated in the following example
provided by Atkins et al. (2008, 280):
a) She gave him a punch in the stomach. (a hard blow
with the fist)
b) It lacks the emotional punch of French cinema. (a
forceful, memorable quality)
c) Glasses of punch were passed around. (an alcoholic
drink mixed from several ingredients)
Atkins et al. (2008, 280) point out that meanings of the
noun punch in ( 2a ) and ( 2b ) are more related than
the meaning expressed in ( 2c ). In ( 2b ) it can be
considered to be “a metaphorical extension of the
physical punch” expressed in (2a), while ( 2c ) is
semantically different
–
it
occupies a “different
semantic area”, despite the fact that it shares the
orthographic quality. The meaning of punch in ( 2c ) has
the origin in the Sanskrit word panch meaning five
–
the punch drink was originally mixed from five
ingredients. To conclude, punch in ( 2a ) and ( 2b ) are
polysemous words (or ‘polysemes’) whereas punch in
( 2c ) is their homonym
According to the analysis, wordplays is mostly created
by using morphological means, especially conversion
and blending. Puns based on syntactic structure were
not recognized. As far as the translation is considered,
the most problematic cases of wordplay were based
on polysemy. In the translation, one of the meanings of
a polysemous word is often omitted. A different
language typology can be one of the reasons of
problems with the translation. On the other hand,
idiomatic expressions were, surprisingly, easier to
translate because of the existence of a equivalent. The
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translation is not always identical, however the formal
and functional aspects are mostly maintained.
Playing with words is a part of everyday
communication that can be produced by everyone. It is
a ceaseless process of creating new puns and new
forms of words and phrase
s. Each individual is able
to produce a differently structured wordplay according
to their knowledge of language, creativity, current
state of mind etc. Delabastita (1996, 129) claims that to
accentuate the power of wordplay, it needs “to be
employed in specially contrived setting.” Wordplay can
be found for example in newspapers where it is used
to attract the reader’s attention and to make the
articles interesting. Another field capitalizing on
wordplay is doubtlessly the field of humour.
Wordplay is the general name for various textual
phenomena in which structural features of the
language(s) used are exploited in order to bring about
a communicatively significant confrontation of two (or
more) linguistic structures with more or less similar
forms and more or less different meanings (1996, 128).
Roman Jakobson (1959, 238
) claims that “all cognitive
experience and its classification is conveyable in any
existing language”. However, as Hatim et al. (2009, 10)
argue, “sound and rhyme and double meaning are
unlikely to be recreated in the TL [target language]”,
i.e. poetry, song, advertising, punning, are difficult to
translate.
Delabastita (1997, 10) also suggests that “wordplay
(certain types of it more than others) tends to resist (to
a greater or lesser extent, depending on many
circumstances) certain kinds of translation
.” The main
problem is that “the sense may be translated, while the
form often cannot” (Hatim et al. 2009, 10). Delabastita
(1996, 133-
134) claims that “the significant wordplay in
the original text has to be preserved rather than
eliminated.” Although it
is sometimes impracticable,
he suggests several methods for translation:
Pun
→
pun: the source-text pun is translated by a
target-language pun, which may be more or less
different from the original wordplay in terms of formal
structure, semantic structure, or textual structure.
Pun
→
non-pun: the pun is rendered by a non-punning
phrase which may salvage both senses of the wordplay
but in a non-punning conjunction, or select one of the
senses at the cost of suppressing the other; of course,
it may also occur that both components of the pun are
translated ‘beyond recognition’.
Pun
→
related rhetorical device: the pun is replaced by
some wordplay-related rhetorical device (repetition,
alliteration, rhyme, referential vagueness, irony,
paradox, etc.) which aims to recapture the effect of the
source-text pun.
Pun
→
zero: the portion of text containing the pun is
simply omitted Pun ST = pun TT: the translator
reproduces the source-text pun and possibly its
Volume 03 Issue 12-2023
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Publisher:
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immediate environment in its original formulation, i.e.
wi
thout actually ‘translating’ it.
Non-pun
→
pun: the translator introduces a pun in
textual positions where the original text has no
wordplay, by way of compensation to make up for
source-text puns lost elsewhere, or for any other
reason.
Zero
→
pun: totally new textual material is added,
which contains wordplay and which has no apparent
precedent or justification in the source text except as
a
compensatory
device
Editorial
techniques:
explanatory footnotes or endnotes, comments
provided in translators’ forewords, the ‘anthological’
presentation of different, supposedly complementary
solutions to one and the same source-text problem,
and so forth Boase-Beier et al. (1999, 14) demonstrates
the role of a translator as an ‘inventive interventionist’,
not as a faithful copier, because it is important to
amuse the target audience, so a translator has to
invent a translation that is as amusing as the original
wordplay and comprehensible for an audience. A
translator takes into consideration the ‘formal
equivalence’,
i.e. translating word-for-word, and
‘dynamic equivalence’, i.e. preserving the function of
wordplay but employing different means. As far as the
translation of TV series is considered, translators
encounter different problems when producing
subtitles and dubbing. Luyken et al. (1991, 31) define
dubbing as “the replacement of the original speech by
a voice track which attempts to follow as closely as
possible the timing, phrasing and lip movements of the
original dialogue.”. Subtitles must follow different
requirements. According to Díaz Cintas and Remael
(2007, 9) it is “synchrony with the image and dialogue
[…], semantically adequate account of the SL
dialogue, and [subtitle duration] long enough for the
viewers to be able to read them.”
CONCLUSION
Wordplay is a linguistic phenomenon which is an
essential part of everyday communication. The use of
wordplay may be intentional as well as unintentional.
Intentional wordplay can be employed in areas such as
media, to attract the attention of the reader or viewer.
An unintentional application of wordplay may be based
on ambiguity of some items in the text in which they
appear, both lexical and syntactic.
REFERENCES
1.
Chiaro, Delia. 1992. The Language of Jokes:
Analysing Verbal Play. NewYork: Routledge.
2.
Cruse, Alan. 2011. Meaning in Language: An
Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.
NewYork: OxfordUniversityPress.
3.
Delabastita, Dirk. 1997. Traductio: Essays on
Punning and Translation. Manchester: St.
JeromePublishing
4.
Makkai, Adam. 1972. Idiom Structure in English.
The Hague: Mouton & Co. N.V. Newmark, P
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5.
Murphy, Lynne M. 2010. Lexical Meaning. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
