A linguistic account of wordplay: The lexical grammar of punning

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to describe both the structure and function of punning wordplay (perhaps a more accurate term would be phraseplay) in English using a number of notions commonly employed in modern lexis-driven descriptions of the language, deriving from the theoretical work, principally, of Sinclair and Hoey. Sinclair demonstrates how the organisation of language at the phrase level relies on two basic underlying principles, the open-choice (or terminological) and the idiom (or phraseological) principles. Hearers/readers have certain predictions or expectations about how speakers/writers employ these principles. The contention put forward in this paper is that it is these organisational expectations which wordplay upsets and exploits. This is undertaken in two principal ways, by relexicalisation and reworking. Hoey's work on lexical priming, instead, provides a lexical–grammatical framework which sheds light on precisely what the linguistic expectations of hearers are and how they come about in the first place. I analyse a considerable number of naturally occurring instances of wordplay collected from a corpus of newspaper texts to examine how these theoretical frameworks apply in practice. In the meantime, having defined punning as the bisociative play between two sound sequences, we consider, again from the perspective of modern linguistics, the vexed question of wordplay motivation, that is, the relationship between the different meanings of the two sound sequences which will affect its quality, its success or failure.