Cultural Conceptualisations in Humorous Discourse in English and Serbian

Abstract

The main aim of this chapter was to explore the under-researched interrelationship between verbal humour and culture exemplified by film and television dialogues in English and Serbian. As much as humour has become a widely explored topic, it seems that the cultural dimensions of it have not yet received enough attention. The corpus of the study, which was selected using a theoretical framework offered by Attardo (Linguistic theories of humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 1994; Humorous texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 2001), contains scripted dialogues taken from several comedies and television series in English and Serbian. Specifically, the corpus of the study was selected using the Knowledge Resources, as defined by Attardo (Humorous texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 2001). In order to get a better insight into different cultures, dialogues in English were taken from both British and USA films, and contrasted with the dialogues in Serbian. Although it is well known that verbal humour is deeply embedded in the given culture, it is important to determine to what extent the interrelationship of linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of verbal humour affects the humorous effect. The theoretical framework of the study was based on the General Theory of Verbal Humour and Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian in Cultural conceptualisations and language. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011; Cultural linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2017). The results of the analysis indicate the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of preferred styles for producing the humorous effect and the tendencies to use both global and culture-specific elements that can serve as a basis for the humorous effect or as means of maximising it.