Eleni Antonopoulou

Conversational dynamics of humour: the telephone game in Greek

Abstract The aim of this paper is to investigate humorous exchanges in Greek telephone conversation openings in the light of Raskin’s (Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. D. Reidel, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster) and Attardo’s (Attardo, Salvatore, 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin; Attardo, Salvatore, 2001. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin) semantico-pragmatic theories of humour and the principles of conversation analysis regarding telephone interaction [Sacks, Harvey, 1995. In: Jefferson, G. (Ed.), Lectures on Conversation, Vols I and II. Blackwell, Oxford (1963, 1970, 1972) (reprint) and Schegloff, Emanuel A., 1972. Sequencing in conversational openings. In: Gumperz, J.J. and Hymes, D. (Eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, pp. 346–380 (1968) (reprint)]. The material analysed (268 humorous exchanges between young adults) shows that such interactions are understood as a game, with interlocutors negotiating and co-constructing tacit rules involving a deliberate attack on social and linguistic conventions while at the same time creating a new code pertaining to in-group members only. The exchanges examined involve wordplay, insincere enquiries, complaints and reprimands. Wordplay in natural conversation has been attributed both an aggressive and a disruptive function (Norrick, Neal R., 1993. Conversational Joking. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indianapolis). Our data point to degrees of disruption, in that despite the playfulness of the exchanges, the canonical pattern including preemptive moves is preserved in most cases. Aggression, on the other hand, is also shown to be scalar and to serve primarily bonding purposes. In the light of the findings we propose a bridge between the GTVH, CA and politeness theory (Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson, 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge), with accompanying modifications considered necessary to account for this type of data and possibly for dialogic material of other types.

A cognitive approach to literary humour devices: translating raymond chandler

Abstract This paper explores ‘Marlovian wisecracks’ in Raymond Chandler’s early texts and their translations into Greek. Source texts and target texts are analyzed using the GTVH (Attardo 1994, 2001), which provides a sound linguistic framework allowing for a comparison of humorous texts. In addition, cognitive linguistic insights are adopted (particularly from Fillmore and Kay’s forthcoming work on Construction Grammar) as it is suggested here that for the purposes of translation research we can benefit from a cognitively based, fine-grained analysis emphasizing idiomaticity. Shifts attested in the target texts are explained in terms of (a) encoding or decoding idiomaticity and conventionalized meanings of constructions, and (b) different humour traditions or repertoires (Toury 1997) in the two languages. A tentative hypothesis is presented relating the suggested motivation for observed shifts to processing effort, which has been shown to impact on humour appreciation (Attardo et al. 1994).

Reviewing linguistic thought : converging trends for the 21st century

The papers in this volume focus on the interaction of different levels of linguistic analysis (syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and the interfaces between them, on the convergence of different theoretical models in explaining linguistic phenomena, and on recent interdisciplinary approaches to linguistic analysis. The selected works, including papers by renowned scholars, highlight the necessity for the study of language to be paired with the study of cognition and for linguistics to develop more substantive links to other disciplines, bringing forward the converging trends which originate within different theoretical frameworks. The volume is of particular relevance to scholars and students who are interested in an in-depth overview of 20th century linguistics outside or beyond the generative paradigm, and in exploring the development of 20th centuryinfluence on current work.