Use of Puns and the Literal Translation of Words and Idioms in Humorous Discourse

Ayesha Rashid Ayesha Rashid

doi:10.32350/llr.v3i1.262

Abstract

Puns revolve around two or more semantically incompatible meanings as they are formed by polysemic and homophonic words used in a certain context. According to the incongruity theory of humour, humour is created due to incongruity between expectation and reality. All kinds of puns are based on ambiguity principles. This study aims to describe and compare lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactical and idiomatic puns and literal translations used in the context of Urdu sitcoms “Hum sub Umeed say hain” and “Hasb-e-Haal” by the help of descriptive-analytical method. Five episodes of each sitcom are analyzed. The rational of choosing these programs is that they revolve around important social issues and sensitive political themes to highlight and eradicate those problems. Findings indicate that lexical and idiomatic puns occur the most in our data, whereas morphological ambiguity is present least in number. The cause of ambiguity of more than a quarter of the data is due to literal translations and code switching. Since little work (and none to my knowledge in Urdu) has been done on puns and working of humorous literal translations of words and idioms in the context of sitcom and comedy discourse, this paper can be a linguistic contribution to the areas of media and humour studies.

Highlights

There is substantial amount of recent work available in Western contexts on the humorous discourse in languages other than Urdu
This study aims to describe and compare lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactical and idiomatic puns and literal translations used in the context of Urdu sitcoms “Hum sub Umeed say hain” and “Hasb-e-Haal” by the help of descriptive-analytical method
An example from Urdu language collected from the data can be: woh aurat takleef say murree ja rahi thi. (That woman was going to murree due to pain.) Here the pun is on the word murree, which means “to die” and it is a recreational place in Pakistan

Summary

Introduction

There is substantial amount of recent work available in Western contexts on the humorous discourse in languages other than Urdu. Puns are generalized as mannerism, poetic licence and light verse. Puns or word play or play on words are the extreme form of language creativity. Puns depend on how verbal expression is manoeuvred (Ermida, 2008). Parrington (2010) asserts that with the slightest changes in original words, puns change their meaning and their humorous quality. Humorous exchanges fall into the category of pragmatics. Humour has its origins as a biological concept in ancient Greek medical science.

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