The specifics of creating puns in languages of different structure

• Main Author: E M Aleksandrova
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) 2016-12-01
• Series: RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics
• Subjects: языковая игра; анекдот; полисемия; паронимия; омонимия; аналитические языки; синтетические языки
• Online Access: http://journals.rudn.ru/semiotics-semantics/article/view/14319

In the article an attempt is made to identify the influence of phonetic and prosodic features of structurally different languages on the specifics of creating puns in Russian, English and French traditions. The results of the research contribute to establish the regularities in relationships of three languages; also they might be useful for comparative and typological stylistics. The research is made on the basis of Russian, English, and French jokes, selected from printed and electronic joke collections. In course of research of pun creating specifics, it was identified that polysemy, paronymy and homonymy were the most popular mechanisms of creating puns. The specifics of creating puns in Russian, English and French joke traditions is influenced by the features of the language system as well as the language group, which identify such characteristics of languages as the average length of words, the specifics of word stress and phrase stress, presence or absence of unstressed vowels reduction, unpronounceable consonants, similarly pronounced inflections.