Word Play Research Articles

Implicit Forms of Ethnic Insult for Europeans (as Found in Rhyming Slang)

The article presents a sociocultural lingual description of ethnic labels created within rhyming slang (Rh.sl.) and used to refer to Europeans. The study and description of ethnic stereotypes and labels have attracted attention of researchers due to the practical significance in regulating, controlling and manipulating the direct contacts and interaction between different ethnic groups. The authors have focused their attention on the so-called «hidden» or «implicit» forms of Rh.sl. Along with the explicit, direct, offensive and non-politically correct ethnic labels and nicknames there are quite a few with a deceptive, innocuous shape that conceals their offensive content. That's why they should be perceived as potentially (if not indeed) offensive names. The authors put the ethnic labels produced in Rh.sl into this category. Since Rh.sl. is subject to a strong influence of the word play and its items are perceived as humorous and ironic nominations, they are not always discerned as offensive by the English speakers. The article contains a linguistic-and-socio-cultural analysis of some implicit forms of ethnic insult of the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese and some other Europeans as well as the native inhabitants of the British Isles. The undertaken analysis of ethnic labels as used to name people from Europe has revealed a broad spectrum of Rh.sl. ethic labels. The description was based on extra-linguistic factors (geographical, demographic, social) comprising the settlement and resettlement, compact presence on a certain territory, statehood. In this respect, there is an ethnic group that falls out - the gypsies (or Roma), as they are scattered across the world and still have a nomadic and semi-nomadic way of life.

Poetic measures of architecture: Martin Heidegger’s ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’

Martin Heidegger begins his lecture ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ by denying poetry is a marginal practice whose imaginings are ‘mere fancies and illusions’. ‘[T]he poetic’, he states, is not ‘merely an ornament and bonus added on to dwelling’. On the contrary, Heidegger boldly claims that poetry is the source of all human dwelling on earth: ‘[…] poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.’The connective tissue of Heidegger's argument in ‘… Poetically Man Dwells …’ is the concept of ‘measure’. In the English translation of the lecture, permutations of the term ‘measure’ (Maß/messen) appear a remarkable ninety-four times, not including dozens more uses of its synonyms: ‘dimension’, ‘span’, ‘meter’ and ‘gauge’. What seems surprising, given that the set-up of the lecture revolves around poetry and measure, is that the commonest understanding of measure related to poetry – poetic measure itself – is not discussed thematically by Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger's incessant word play produces meanings that include ‘measuring against’ in the sense of comparing to a standard, ‘measuring up’ a space by ‘stepping-out’ (durchmessen), ‘measuring out’ in the sense of dividing-up or apportioning (das Zu-Gemessene), ‘being measured’ in the sense of having propriety, ‘taking measures’ (die Maß-Nahme) in response to a situation, and ‘measuring between’ as a distance or span. These meanings are of course related to common poetic measure, and might even be claimed to be its ground.

Exploring capitalist fiction: business through literature and film

Preface Introduction Chapter 1. The Rise of Silas Lapham: A Story of Self-Identity, Self-Respect, and Morality Chapter 2. Taking a Look at Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward Chapter 3. Frank Norris's The Octopus: An Epic of Wheat and Railroads Chapter 4. The Financier: Theodore Dreiser's Portrait of a Darwinian Businessman Chapter 5. Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky Chapter 6. Babbitt: Sinclair Lewis's Portrait of a Middle-Aged Middle Class Businessman Chapter 7. is Henry M. Galt?: A Review of Garet Garrett's The Driver Chapter 8. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Chapter 9. An American Romance: King Vidor's Epic Film of Immigration and the American Dream Chapter 10. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Case of Self-Delusion Chapter 11. John P. Marquand's Point of No Return Chapter 12. Henry Hazlitt's Time Will Run Back: A Tale of the Reinvention of Capitalism Chapter 13. Executive Suite: A Story of Corporate Success and Succession Chapter 14. Cash McCall: The Story of a Heroic Corporate Rider Chapter 15. Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Chapter 16. Atlas Shrugged: An Epic Story of Heroic Businessmen Chapter 17. Sometimes a Great Notion: The Story of a Family Who Would Never Give an Inch Chapter 18. Wilfrid Sheed's Office Politics: A Lesson about Organizational Conflict Chapter 19. The Franchiser: Stanley Elkin's Tale of a Man Who Wanted to Costume the Country Chapter 20. Glengarry Glen Ross: A David Mamet Word Play Chapter 21. Wall Street: Oliver Stone's Zero-Sum Vision of Capitalism Chapter 22. Tucker: The Man and His Dream Chapter 23. David Lodge's Nice Work: A Tale of Two Cultures Chapter 24. Other People's Money: A Tale of Capitalism and Creative Destruction Chapter 25: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Conclusion

Dry or picturesque? The use of figurative language in Israeli supreme court verdicts

Abstract The legal language of lawyers and judges is generally dry and factual but an examination of the rulings of Israeli Supreme Court justices shows that at least some of them use very picturesque speech to support their positions. This paper describes the use of figurative language as employed by Israeli Supreme Court justices in their writing of verdicts. Examples of the use of metaphors, metonymy, word play, imagery, oxymorons, parables and allegory are cited and discussed.

Polemički stil A.G. Matoša

Antun Gustav Matoš is the father of the Croatian literary polemics. By confronting his con- temporaries, he shaped a unique style of polemicizing which is characterized by straight- forwardness, wit, elegance of speech and artistry. This style is based on various procedures which Matoš used in his polemics as well as on different textual patterns through which he articulated his polemical thought. The paper descibes and exemplifi es seven stylistic proce- dures (portraying in oposition, polemical quote, polemical naming, polemical verb, polemical maxim, word play, polemical point) and eight textual patterns (literary criticism, fi ctitious dialogue, comical story, polemical poem, aphorism, drama, polemical epistle). The opulence of Matoš’s style produces a polemics which is both carnevalesque and fi ctional. He brings together what is seemingly incompatible – the polemics which is based on the truth principle and fi ction which is essentially indifferent towards that principle.

Czy fajny jest fajny? Współczesne leksemy młodzieżowe o znaczeniu ‘taki, który mi się (bardzo) podoba’

Is fajny ‘cool’ cool? Modern teenage lexemes meaning ‘such that I like (a lot)’
 The paper examines the functioning of a very numerous group of lexemes synonymous to the adjective fajny ‘such that I like (a lot)’, which can be found in the language of contemporary teenagers, e.g. fajowy, super, spoko, cool, słit (sweet), odjazdowy, wypasiony, epicki, zajebisty, zacny. It analyses the conditions and methods used to multiply this category of lexemes in the teenage slang – which has these days a powerful impact on general Polish. The points of reference are the phenomena characteristic of slang: expressiveness, fashion, richness of synonyms and tautonyms. These questions are considered against the background of current cultural and linguistic changes (structural processes, borrowing, colloquialization, vulgarization and devulgarization, word play).

Słowotwórcze zasoby nowych stylów funkcjonalnych w językach słowiańskich

Derivational resources of new functional styles in the Slavic Languages
 In this paper, the author focuses primarily on several new functional styles, and such productive word-formative processes as compounding and affixation in modern Slavic languages. Minor processes like blending, clipping, and back formation are left aside. Based on large corpora and smaller hand-collected samples of electronic texts, the data has been drawn from advertising, daily press and the communicational sphere of information technology. The author hopes to demonstrate that the functional side of word formation is significantly more complex than simple naming and/or syntactic recategorization, etc. This becomes particularly evident as one ventures beyond the rather stable area of the lexicon and its conventionalized word-stock, and begins to consider active coining of novel lexical items, something that depends heavily on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The very act of forming a complex word serves a specific purpose in the textual and/or situational context. It is often that particular and specialized functions can be discovered, many of a metacommunicative nature. The paper aims to examine the processes of productivity and to highlight creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles. Lexical creativity in journalism, advertising and electronic communication is employed in order to achieve certain stylistic effects, such as humour or irony. It is also a device to convey to the reader a sense of the author’s learnedness, sophistication, distance, and so on. It manifests itself in puns and other kinds of word play, metaphorical extension, willful error and duplication of the role of an existing formation. The article also deals with the evolution of specialized word-formative types of complex words, ones that lack a connecting vowel as a mean of expression of complex concepts of attributive and contextual content. Composition of a new type of complex words corresponds to a historical drift in formation of analytic and agglutinative lines in Russian.

Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion by Katrin Pahl

Reviewed by: Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion by Katrin Pahl Michael G. Levine Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion. By Katrin Pahl. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. ix + 283 pages. $32.95. Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion is an original, closely argued, and rigorous engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, an engagement that remains true to the Hegelian text by transforming it in consistently surprising and provocative ways. To begin, let me lay out some of the ways Pahl deftly negotiates what she defines as the “double bind” of her reading practice (84), a practice whose method of transformative reading is derived from the text’s own economy, so that, as she writes “(paradoxically) I remain true to the Hegelian text by transforming it. As a result, no matter how much I alter the text, my reading will still be Hegelian—but hopefully I will have been a good friend and will have introduced a shift in the meaning of ‘Hegelian’” (84). Like everything else upon which the study touches, the notion of friendship is given a very particular twist in Tropes of Transport; this is most apparent in the discussion of the end of the Phenomenology where Hegel cedes the last word to Schiller, quoting his poem “Friendship” (94–96). As Pahl brilliantly argues, it is at the very limit of the Phenomenology, at the moment the text is expected to state what spirit knows when it has come to know itself, that systematic discourse instead breaks into song (95). Such a shift confirms Pahl’s contention that absolute knowledge, having been nothing but the path toward absolute knowledge, cannot be reduced to a statement. Not only does the citation of Schiller hold the text open at its close but, in doing so, it gives place to a scene in which the very notion of “friendship” is redefined. Here Pahl shows herself to have been a “good friend” by demonstrating how “friendship” involves a complex citational practice (94–99). Letting Schiller speak in his place, Hegel in one sense abandons control over the book. Yet, in another sense he continues to speak through the passage he quotes, speaking like a ventriloquist through Schiller. At stake here is not only the status of the poem “Friendship” and its equivocal placement at the end of the Phenomenology but a renegotiation, more generally, of the relationship between philosophy and poetry. According to the terms of this new friendship, neither philosophy nor poetry speaks alone. Instead, each gains its voice through the other, through a certain twisting of the other’s words. While Pahl traces further twists in this increasingly contorted interrelationship, twists whose subtlety and dialectical rigor are truly admirable, it must suffice here to note how almost every [End Page 300] term initially used in a straightforward sense—terms such as “Hegelian,” “friendship,” and “quotation”—comes in Pahl’s reading to be surrounded by quotation marks. I take the proliferation of these marks to be emblematic of her approach, of the way she remains true to the “Hegelian” text by transforming it. This transformative process in which Pahl participates begins, she argues, with Hegel’s own engagement with tradition, with a philosophical language he has been sent [geschickt] that is not suited [nicht geschickt] to express speculative truths (108). Hegel, she notes, does not “argue with tradition” nor does he simply “desist from presenting or exposing the speculative” (108). Striking an unsteady compromise between two ways of philosophically constructing propositions—speculatively and argumentatively [räsonnierend] (109), a compromise that will be ceaselessly renegotiated in the course of the Phenomenology—Hegel develops an expositional rhythm wherein these different modes of construction “take part in one another while taking each other apart” (109). As always, Pahl takes pains to unpack what might at first appear as slick word play. Thus, she continues, “[t]raditional logic does not persist untouched; it is shaken by the speculative rhythm. Similarly, by embracing the very logic that rejects the speculative, Hegel invites trouble in the heart of his philosophy” (109). Rhythm is a major theme of Pahl’s study and it is the great virtue of her approach that it resists the...

Entre flor y flor (De unas propiedades de la palabra flor en la poesía de Góngora)

Propone este artículo el análisis del uso semántico y semiótico que hace Góngora del significante flor(es) a lo largo de su producción poética. Se recalcan los juegos conceptistas y su neutralización, el sitio que ocupa la palabra en los textos, el sistema de rimas que rige, sus repeticiones y su papel relevante en la música de los poemas.

Encenações da descrença: a performance dos espíritos e a presentificação do real

Para J. Fabian, a performance reescreve a clássica questão shakespeariana de “ser ou não ser”, como “ser e não ser”. É por meio da ambiguidade da performance, trazida à tona neste jogo de palavras, que buscamos explorar os sentidos da descrença que impregnam tanto estórias sobre “espíritos”, contadas pelos que lhes procuram em busca de “conselhos” e “ajuda” em centros religiosos afro-brasileiros, como estórias sobre a mandinga da capoeira. Partindo da relação teatral entre encenação e suspensão da descrença, o artigo se encontra suspenso entre o retraçar de um modo pelo qual uma visão essencialmente teatral da vida social tem sido elaborada nas ciências sociais e uma intervenção etnográfica nesta visão, em rumo à uma noção mais propriamente performativa do real.

The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama by Philip Lorenz (review)

Philip Lorenz. The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 379. $45.00. The central concept of this book hinges around a play on words in the title: specifically, a double entendre for the word tears, which can mean the product either of weeping or shredding of fabric. What is conveyed by this word play is at once a destruction and a nostalgia for what has been destroyed. So what we have here is a narrative--trendily postmodern, with an After-Image instead of a conclusion--but nonetheless a fairly teleological narrative of disintegration and reconstruction/restoration of the sovereign ruler. The pattern here is cyclical, as may be seen in the (mostly) alliterative titles for the chapters: Breakdown, Reanimation Resistance, Transformation, and Return. The author offers a unique take on Ernst Kantorowicz's famous formulation of the king's two bodies with the introduction of such complicating metaphors as organ transplant. The spice he adds to this updating of an old and familiar, but yummy, recipe consists of apparently farfetched but relevant cinematic allusions, such as to Pedro Almodovar's 1999 film All About My Mother. Combine this with a very au courant theoretical framework of a hodgepodge of European political philosophers, most notably Giorgio Agamben, and you have what is in the end a substantial, well-nuanced, and sophisticated comparative study of representations of sovereignty in early modern Spanish and English drama. The authors offered for consideration here are the familiar ones: William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderon de la Barca. And one potentially regrettable fact is that the plays discussed in each case are the same old worn-out canonical fare: Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Winter's Tale for Shakespeare; Fuenteovejuna for Lope de Vega; and Life is a Dream for Calderon. But this is the rare book that actually manages to say something relatively new about each play. This is no small accomplishment, and the author is to be congratulated both for his incisive analysis of each of the works in question and for the creative ways in which he combines disparate elements from two distinct national dramatic traditions. Seldom has this reviewer seen so genuinely comparative a study as this one. The haunting the entire text of this book is the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suarez. I say phantom not because he is not there explicitly, but because he got burned--literally, or at least his work did, in a spectacular bonfire scene that opens this book. On December 1, 1613, almost exactly 400 years ago, King James I of England ordered a ritual burning of work Defensio fidei in front of Saint Paul's Cathedral As Lorenz so eloquently states, Suarez's book landed in England like a bomb, not only challenging Royalist claims that James's power was directly derived from God but also threatening to undermine the king's authority over the bodies and souls of his subjects (1-2). In essence, Defensio fidei was a casuistical defense of revolution and civil disobedience; it authorized the use of violent force, under certain circumstances, to resist and even overthrow a king. Basically, it justified regicide. For those erudite readers such as James who could understand enough Latin to grasp fully the implications of his argument, this was heady stuff indeed. One possible weakness of Lorenz's presentation is that by the time of King James's reign, Latin had already ceased to be so pervasive as it was in former eras. (Clear evidence of this appears in George Ruggle's contemporaneous play Ignoramus [1615], in which Latin is literally demonized by association with demonic possession.) There is probably a limit to how pervasive his ideas could really be if fewer and fewer people were able to read and comprehend them. But nonetheless, Lorenz is right to identify Suarez as the most important anti-sovereignty thinker of his era; and as such, he hovers over the text of this book like an avenging fury. …

Home and back again: Texts and contexts in Turkish immigrant theatre in France

Abstract This article argues that the public space of theatre in an immigrant language can contribute to making immigrants and their offspring feel at home in the host country. In France, however, there is little public support for theatre in immigrant languages, since it is perceived as segregating immigrants from French cultural spaces and encouraging communautarisme, or the fragmentation of society along ethnic or religious lines, thus violating the spirit of equality inscribed in the constitution. Through interviews with the Turkish-French theatre group Kebab Show and analysis of their plays, this article argues that what anti-communautaristes see as theatre intended to segregate immigrant communities may instead contribute to making them at home in France. For older members of the community, native-language theatre provides a bridge between the country of origin and France. For their children and grandchildren born in France, this native-language theatre publicly acknowledges a part of themselves that is usually relegated to private home spaces. Filled with word play and humorous situations that require knowledge of both Turkish and French cultures, such theatre suggests the important role that native and bilingual theatre can play in the process of helping all the generations of an immigrant community feel at home.

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication.

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication. New Edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012, 128 pp. $14.95 paper(9781584350576) It is somewhat unsettling to find oneself writing a retrospective piece on the 25th anniversary reissue of The Ecstasy of Communication. Jean Baudrillard would smell a rat right away. After all, this text was already retrospective in itself, serving as his habilitation thesis meant to review the assumed coherence and trajectory of his published work (and promote him to the lofty status of research director in the academy). As he explains at the beginning of the book, this is an impossible contradiction because it retroactively imposes unity on the texts. He proposes instead to approach his own work as a traveller who stumbles upon the texts and must try to make sense of them. For a generation of graduate students (of which I was a part), stumbling, discovering, and trying to make sense are familiar experiences of encountering Baudrillard, as his translated work first began to make its way into the Canadian classroom. But this encounter was also exhilarating--it meant submitting our most basic sociological assumptions to the assault of his logic. Baudrillard forever disrupted our simple notions of representation built on the false/true image or word, along with sociological totems like stereotype, false consciousness, and manipulation (and their social correlatives--the silently oppressed, mass man, and cultural dupe). In their place came a serious consideration of the world saturated with the play, pleasures, and terrors of images and words--so saturated that the notion of the became threatened by its own overrepresentation. If we ever believed that the real could exist outside of its representation, this fantasy became more and more untenable as media and technology developed through the 20th century. Baudrillard is perhaps a little disingenuous when he claims no coherence to his work preceding Ecstasy. Baudrillard's earliest work grappled with the problem of Marx's exchange/use value distinction, with use value revealed as a construction of human need unmediated by signification and systems of the circulation of meaning. By adding the semiotic levels of symbol and sign to the mix, Baudrillard allowed readers to begin to see the world of contemporary capitalism. The symbol was an object still linked into a system of sacred meaning and irreplaceability (he gives the wedding ring as an example), and a sign was an object that got its meaning only in the unending movement of signification itself and is essentially replaceable (he gives rings as fashionable jewellery as an example). The symbolic realm functions outside of utility and production. Instead it is a wasteful, irrational, and excessive world--that of gift, potlatch, sacrifice. It is for this reason also profoundly social. A quarter of a century after the first publication of Ecstasy, it is time to acknowledge that Baudrillard is not a strange, exotic foreigner--a French theorist, a postmodern, or as the book cover insists, a provocateur. It is no mere coincidence that so much Baudrillard scholarship happens in Canada, as thinkers like McLuhan and Innis are his intellectual ancestors. In Ecstasy we find Baudrillard's McLuhanesque description of the car as total system that monitors itself and the driver, speaks to the driver, informs, advises, controls--and into which we are wired. (Like McLuhan, Baudrillard is often wrongly considered an advocate for the brave new world he so accurately analyzes.) Innis too haunts these pages, with the monumental, durable form of political domination and representation being replaced by the fleeting, incessant, and light world of the hyper-real. Monuments and buildings, Baudrillard explains are no longer testaments to memory and time, but are now machines for advertising, fashion, and the sign system. The dominant trope animating all of Baudrillard's work is that of keeping up with the social phenomena around him. …

Notes as Debts in Vladimir Nabokov's PALE FIRE

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: annotationVladimir Nabokovobligation Pale Fire word play

Mehrdeutigkeit und Humor in der Übersetzung

This paper is dedicated to the concept of ambiguity and humor as an intercultural phenomenon. In the first section, we introduce different concepts of the term humor in literature from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, psychology and cognitive linguistics. We attempt to show that the concept of humor and ambiguity of an intercultural and interlingual perspective may belong to the most difficult areas of translation theory. At the same time, humor and polysemy are the key concepts of a semantically and pragmatically based theory of translation. In the second section, we will briefly deal with the phenomena of humor and ambiguity from the psycholinguistic and cognitive point of view and thereby we try to analyze the difference between visuality and textuality of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” in film and on stage. The third section of this paper is devoted to the phenomenon of interculturality and the interlingual translation of pragmatic and cognitive-semantic categories on the example of polysemy, vagueness, irony, pun, word play and joke (and its various strategies and conversational implicatures in the literary text). It is assumed that initially the validity of the Relevance criterion (Sperber & Wilson 2005) and the validity of the principle of cooperation are in play, even in a text that is commonly considered as ‘meaningless’. We want to prove the example of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake‘, demonstrating that even such a seemingly illegible or difficult text that has often been considered non transferable, in a certain pattern and its narrative potential of the storyline, in the dynamics and in the progression descends from and is determined by the VALIDITY of the criterion of relevance. In another part of this third section, we turn to the Elizabethan drama of Shakespeare and the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, Ulysses by James Joyce as well as the unforgettable Novel by Jaroslav Hašek Brave Soldier Švejk, showing how wit and irony work and can be translated.

Vocabulary instruction: research to practice

Introduction. Kame'enui, Baumann, Context for Vocabulary Instruction. Part I: Teaching Specific Vocabulary. McKeown, Beck, Sandora,Direct and Rich Vocabulary Instruction Needs to Start Early. Biemiller, Teaching Vocabulary in the Primary Grades: Vocabulary Instruction Needed. Coyne, Capozzoli-Oldham, Simmons,Vocabulary Instruction for Young Children at Risk of Reading Difficulties: Teaching Word Meanings during Shared Storybook Readings. K.D. Stahl, S.A. Stahl, Young Word Wizards!: Fostering Vocabulary Development in Preschool and Primary Education. Part II: Teaching Vocabulary-Learning Strategies. Graves, Ruda, Sales, Baumann,Teaching Prefixes: Making Strong Instruction Even Stronger. Templeton, The Vocabulary-Spelling Connection and Generative Instruction: Morphological Knowledge at the Intermediate Grades and Beyond. Baumann, Carr Edwards, Boland, Font, Teaching Word-Learning Strategies. Part III: Teaching Vocabulary through Word Consciousness and Language Play. Scott, Miller, Leigh Flinspach, Developing Word Consciousness: Lessons from Highly Diverse Fourth-Grade Classroom. Blachowicz, Fisher, Keep the Fun in Fundamental: Encouraging Word Consciousness and Incidental Word Learning in the Classroom through Word Play. Johnson, Johnson, Schlichting, Language Play: Essential for Literacy. Part IV: Special Topics in Vocabulary Instruction. Pearson, Hiebert, Kamil, Vocabulary Assessment: Making Do with What We Have While We Create the Tools We Need. Cunningham, Ryan O'Donnell, Reading and Vocabulary Growth. Manyak, Powerful Vocabulary Instruction for English Learners. Castek, Dalton, Grisham, Using Multimedia to Support Generative Vocabulary Learning. Hiebert, Cervetti, What Differences in Narrative and Informational Texts Mean for the Learning and Instruction of Vocabulary.

Primary grade students engage in creative word play through traditional and hands-on methods

Word play is an important skill allowing product names, show titles, jokes, poetry and other writings or orations to be interesting, entertaining and well-remembered. This pretest–posttest counterbalanced study compared two instructional approaches for teaching second and third grade students (n = 71) word play skills. Students at a public elementary school in Iowa, United States studied vowel patterns and rhyming as part of the regular school curriculum for literacy through two conditions: a traditional format of reading, pocket charts, worksheets and oral discussion; versus a more concrete approach of arranging objects and corresponding word cards in a chart-like formation. There was no significant difference in student performance between the conditions but an attitude survey indicated that a large majority of students preferred the object boxes for understanding of word play concepts and task enjoyment.

The tastes and distastes of verbivores – some observations on X-phemisation in Bulgarian and English

X-phemisation constitutes a powerful appraisal resource which weaves the ethnopragmatic texture of a culture. X-phemisms constitute a special type of non-literal language which capitalizes on all other possible types of non-literal language and the creative exploitation of phonetic-based word play. The main aim in the present paper is to elaborate on a hypothesis of X-phemisation via lexical extension (recruitment) as involving the mechanism of nominal metaphor at the conceptual level. This mechanism involves reframing of the vehicle (target) denotatum with an accompanying rearrangement in salience rating in the arising ad hoc concept resulting from blending the frames of the topic and vehicle denotata. This stereotype-violating mechanism reveals the power of human ingenuity at the deepest level of linguistic creativity. The ad hoc X-phemistic concept blends in an axiologically motivated manner the contextually relevant features of both denotata in a salience-constrained perceptually and evaluatively ordered set of features, triggered by the initial anchoring via the topic denotatum evoked by the actual lexical expression (the vehicle lexical concept). X‑phemisms (from fully lexicalized ones to highly innovative/artful ones) and X‑phemisation as an epiphenomenal occurrence in online linguistic interaction are seen as constituting a special subsystem in the appraisal resources of a language. This subsystem has special status with its high creativity and figurativity. Figurativity captures simultaneously the emergent, dynamic nature of X-phemisms and their grounding in stable conceptual metaphoric structures (in terms of strategies for their production/comprehension). Despite the diversity of X-phemism types (both in terms of their overall pragmatic effect) and the nature of their origin (resulting from substitution, lexical creativity, metaphoric transfers, phonetic innovation, word play, etc.), X‑phemisms constitute a complex uniform catgory whose complexity can only be adequately studied in the framework of interactional cognitive studies, where the emotional brain is also subsumed under ‘cognitive’.

Laughter in university lectures

This paper analyses laughter in spoken academic discourse, with the aim of discovering why lecturers provoke laughter in their lectures. A further purpose of the paper is to identify episodes in British data which may differ from those in other cultural contexts where other lecturing practices prevail, and thus to inform the design of study skills and staff development programmes for multilingual, multicultural, international university environments. Examination of the data indicates that the management of laughter in British lectures is strategic, and has a rhetorical purpose. Six main types of laughter episode are described: 'teasing', 'lecturer error', self-deprecation', 'black humour', disparagement' and 'word play'. Laughter results from references to shared ‘scripts’ for student and lecturer behaviour, evaluations of outsiders who do not form part of the lecturer-student in-group, and the lecturers' efforts to forge group intimacy. It serves as a means of maintaining social order, building rapport, relieving tension, and modelling academic and professional identities. Comparisons of laughter episodes across cultures, however, suggest that references to conventional British lecturer and student scripts would be out of place in many non-British contexts.

Unifying Yoruba reduplication constructions and their semantic relatives

Employing the morphosemantic identity approach of Inkelas and Zoll (2005) and Inkelas (2008), this paper presents data from Yoruba showing that morphological reduplication is compounding, and that this compound structure is primarily governed by semantics, which may require similarity, near-similarity or dissimilarity of compound members. On this view, several cases of reduplication patterns that have been treated as separate and unrelated in Yoruba can be seen as a unitary phenomenon. The analysis of these patterns is shown to naturally extend to the analysis of a special class of reduplicated homonym-synonyms, an extremely common pattern seen in poetic word play. In spite of the general success of the morphological approach, some patterns still require a prosodic rather than a morphological analysis. These patterns counter-exemplify the theory's strong claim that partial and total reduplication are morphologically constrained. They show that morphologically induced reduplication must be distinguished from prosodically induced reduplication (Pulleyblank 2009). By keeping these two entities distinct, reduplication can target either or both simultaneously. Finally, specifying the context of reduplication requires direct reference to phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and thus demonstrates the multidimensionality of reduplication.