Metalinguistic Activity of Wordplay Creator in Classroom Bilungual Dialogs

Abstract

The article introduces the reader to the phenomenon of wordplay in the dialogues of classroom bilinguals with a high level of the English proficiency, who practice this foreign language either in classroom environment, or in real communication. It is emphasized that the dialogues around the facts of wordplay become the locus of metalinguistic utterances of the participants in this speech act. The purpose of this article is to identify the metalanguage utterances of the wordplay creator which open access to the creator’s metalanguage consciousness through the identification of his speech strategies. The novelty of the research is that a foreign language speech is used as the wordplay source, and the wordplay is equated with the phenomenon of the metalanguage nature. The author presents the concept of normema as a standard language unit of the target foreign language, which turns out to be a trigger for the creation of non-standard language units or igremas. It is noted that the wordplay creator uses both the purely formal and meaningful wordplay, and the non-standard language units created by him function as socially directed at a specific addressee. A detailed systematization of the creator’s metalanguage comments accompanying the wordplay input is given, namely, the linguistic and communicative comments, which demonstrates the metalanguage logic of constructing a speech act.