Substandard phonetic realisations and their functions in Stanisław Bareja’s comedies

Abstract

The paper examines the substandard pronunciation of certain words in the comedies by a popular Polish filmmaker, Stanisław Bareja. The empirical material was obtained using the auditive method. The author claims that non-literary phonetic realisations that appear in the fi lm dialogues imitate: 1) colloquial mispronunciations; 2) dialectal pronunciation (especially typical of the urban dialect of Warsaw); 3) hypercorrect pronunciation; 4) speech defects and unfamiliarity with foreign words. Subsequently, he lists several important functions of the phonetic peculiarities. The filmmaker used them primarily to achieve humorous effects. However, the analysis has also revealed that they indicated: 1) the place of action; 2) the social affiliation of the characters; 3) the intellectual level of the characters; 4) the ethnicity of the characters; 5) the level of formality of the communicative situation.