LINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO VERBAL AND VISUAL PUNS Daniela Sorea Alexandra Stoica Abstract The present paper attempts

to define and analyse the most widely acknowledged type of wordplay, puns, by examining their structure as well as the cognitive processes meant to trigger humorous ambiguity. The analysis will hopefully reveal how the potential expectation-challenging effects puns have upon comprehenders are indicative of the punsters capacity to manipulate language for humorous purposes. Key-words: puns, ambiguity, polysemy, humour 1. Defining puns Most linguists endeavour to define puns in terms of divergence rather than overlapping or similarity of meaning. Koestler (1964) argues that puns are generated as a consequence of the bisociation of a single phonetic form with two meanings two strings of thought tied together by an acoustic knot (Koestler 1964: 65 in Partington 2008: 2). Co-existence of conflicting meanings equally underlies Attardos definition of puns, who advocates that, though couched in different theoretical frameworks, all linguistic (and non-linguistic) analyses agree on the fact that puns involve two senses. (Attardo 1994: 127-128) A brief yet resourceful stretch of discourse, the pun is meant to employ its structure and exploit its intended communicative function in order to arouse laughter by means of the concomitant use of ambiguity and unexpected juxtaposition. Puns urge comprehenders to focus on the deliberately generated confusion between the two meanings of the same written or spoken word. Such foreseeable confusion is a source of ambiguity, further enhanced by displaying either oppositeness or unexpected juxtaposition of the respective meanings of the word. Whether deliberate or accidental, ambiguity is a recurrent feature of verbal and multimodal discourses and has proved an extremely productive device in generating puns. However, as Attardo (1994) maintains, all words are ambiguous, vague, or unspecified if they are not taken in context. [] Mere ambiguity is not enough to create a pun, otherwise how could one differentiate between a pun and an ambiguous utterance such as Flying planes can be dangerous (Attardo 1994: 133). Otherwise put, to create a pun, certain additional requirements emerge: the need to revolve around two conflicting meanings of the same word or phrase and the deliberate endeavour to generate ambiguity, preferably by a speaker who manages to produce a context that accommodates both meanings in a manner intended to arouse laughter. Undoubtedly, as Partington points out, ambiguity may be unwillingly produced, and then

it is the hearer who creates or authors the pun by producing some kind of back-channel behaviour (laughing, groaning, saying Thats a good one, and so on) which draws attention to another possible meaning of the first speakers utterance (Partington 2008: 1796). This is the case of spontaneous puns, which emerge on the spur of the moment and which Partington (2008: 1796) categorises as unscripted, since they are not intentional and do not follow the landmarks of some pre-established scenario, yet are verbally or behaviourally highlighted by other interlocutors. However, most puns are indeed scripted, i.e. willingly and purposefully devised, since they pursue a specific goal and address a foreseeable target-audience. With adverts, scripted puns usually revolve around some conflicting representations, where the visual input tends to create some kind of incongruity with the verbal text so as to generate some expectationchallenging or even subversive effect upon the audience (Van Mulken 2005). 2. Partingtons classification of puns As our subsequent analysis of a set of multimodal puns will show, visual texts are often used to amplify the conflicting constituents of ambiguity and to enhance the expectation-challenging potential of puns. According to the potential for plurality of interpretation which puns need to display, Partington (2008: 1798-1802) distinguishes between two types of puns: 1. Near puns, which comprise those puns where only one interpretation is overtly available to the comprehender. Any other possible interpretation needs to be inferred from the context or from its more or less striking resemblance to the already existent interpretation. 2.Exact puns, which include those puns which revolve around the exploitation of homonyms and homophones, in which both meanings are retrievable from the utterance and successively activated, while priority of meaning considerably depends on the contextually-generated salience of certain meanings. For further clarification of Partingons categorisation, the concept of salience will be dealt with in the next subsection. 3. Salience According to Giora, salience is graded in that it conceives of the lexicon as hierarchically structured. Although the various meanings of a word (bank) may be listed, one (the institutional sense of bank) may be more salient, while the other (the riverside sense of bank) may be less salient. In addition, it is graded in that it assumes that the internal hierarchical structure of the lexicon is not fixed, but dynamic (Giora 2003: 18). In Gioras view, the salient meaning of a word or expression, i.e. the meaning one can retrieve from their mental lexicon rather than from the context, is significantly influenced by factors such as familiarity, frequency, conventionality and prototypicality. To illustrate her approach to salience,

Giora discusses some examples of semantic ambiguity. She starts by recounting an event she herself experienced: The other day, when I was shopping in the mall, I saw a shoe shop named Body and Sole (Giora 2003: 14), stating that, although the context compelled her to think of the footwearrelated meaning of sole (the bottom part of the shoe that covers the sole of the foot), the familiarity of the expression caused her mind to immediately slip towards the homophone soul, although that meaning did not expectedly fit this particular context. Giora (2003) argues that the process of salience is characterized by degrees of priority, which are powerfully influenced by several factors. Thus, the frequency of occurrence of a certain meaning is crucial in order to determine its level of salience, because the more frequently we encounter the sense of a word, the most likely the respective meaning becomes salient for us. Familiarity is another key factor which ensures the salience of the most widespread meaning, i.e. the meaning with which most people are acquainted. Salience is also considerably influenced by conventionality, since the more conventional the meaning, the quicker it is to retrieve (Giora 2003: 17). Giora opines that the mental lexicon is a dynamic repository constantly prone to changes and outer socio-cultural influences, which may lead to occasional adjustments in its structure. The persistence of a meaning of a word or phrase in peoples minds is highly dependent on experience and the amount of time spent familiarizing with that particular meaning; The assumption is that meanings are retained if they might be conducive to the interpretation process, but they are discarded (reduced below baseline rates) if they interfere with comprehension and fade if they have no role in comprehension (Giora 2003: 26). In the case of puns, newly emerged meanings can gain ground and become rooted in the mental lexicon, provided that comprehenders benefit from sufficient exposure to such meanings. Having clarified the role played by salience, we will further examine Partingtons near puns and exact puns in the lines to come. 4. Relexicalisation According to Partington (2008), the production of near puns exploits the mechanism of reconstructing an original form of a fixed expression so as to yield a new version which, once embedded in the appropriate context, is very likely to trigger laughter. A frequent procedure employed in creating puns is the relexicalisation of preconstructed phrases (Partington 2008: 1797), which supposes the reinterpretation of the most salient meaning of an expression or collocation and the subsequent disclosure of a less salient, less expected, yet challenging and humour-generating meaning: The effect achieved is a general revitalisation of the language at that point of the text. Novelty breathes life into the discourse. Relexicalisation is thus one of the fundamental linguistic processes underlying many forms of phraseplay. The kinds of (semi)-preconstructed phrases which appear in such plays are of practically any sort, from proverbs and sayings to quotations, idioms, and even simple common collocations (Partington 2008: 1801). The following section will delve into the intertwined functioning of relexicalisation, polysemy and ambiguity.

5. Polysemy and ambiguity Since both salience and relexicalisation are closely interlinked with polysemy, a definition of the concept is required. The word polysemy originates in the Greek polusemous, whose constitutive parts [poly = many and sema = sign] indicate its current meaning, namely having many meanings or, more conventionally, having multiple meanings. Enlarging upon this definition, one can add that polysemy supposes the co-occurrence of two or several meanings in only one word or expression. Despite being different, the respective meanings always have a common denominator which ensures their close relationship. Deeply anchored in polysemy is another aspect of language, namely ambiguity, since words, phrases and even sentences become ambiguous when they are assignable more than one meaning, Ambiguity is of two main types: lexical and structural. Lexical ambiguity is by far the more frequently encountered, because it is conveyed by the use of words inherently endowed with two or more meanings, like for example: the adjective hard (which can mean either difficult or rigid, solid), the noun crane (a machine with a long arm which is used to lift and move heavy weights and a large bird with long legs and a long neck), the verb to draw (to make pictures using pencils or chalk or to pull or move something into a new position) and exceedingly many others. Structural ambiguity, on the other hand, is brought about by phrases or sentences which can be understood in at least two ways because of a misguiding word order; thus, a phrase like American history teacher can refer either to an American teacher who gives history lectures or to a teacher whose subject matter is American history; in a construction such as: tall men and children, the adjective tall can be a physical trait describing only the men or the men and children alike. A thought-provoking perspective on ambiguity as related to polysemy is put forth by Nerlich and Clarke (2001), who show an interest in studying live polysemy (2001: 3), by observing the way in which people employ polysemous words in everyday conversation. The two scholars are concerned with whether speakers create ambiguity deliberately or unintentionally, as well as the effects that they seek to produce. Nerlich and Clarkes (2001) re-assess the Gricean distinction between speaker meaning and utterance meaning and the role ambiguity plays in clarifying this distinction. According to Grice, Speakers meaning is to be teased out in terms of Speakers intentions. In all verbal exchanges, meanings contextually arise from pairing utterances with intentions. Thus, an utterance such as Thank you for your support is intended as an expression of gratitude on the part of the speaker for some previous act the addressee did for their welfare. Yet, the context in which the speaker formulates their thanks may also indicate an ironical use of a conventional formula employed to express gratitude, since the speaker may utter congratulatory words insincerely and with the overt intention of sounding insincere, in order to point out that the hearer does not deserve an ounce of gratitude, presumably because they have shown no support (Sorea 2007: 6) . As Thomas concisely and clearly states, To imply is to hint, suggest or convey some meaning indirectly by means of language (Thomas 1995: 58). It is the context which facilitates grasping the relationship between what is said and what is implied and which enables interlocutors to comprehend conversational implicatures, i.e. those meanings the speaker implies rather than says by using a specific utterance in a specific context. Contextual clues, alongside with background knowledge and interlocutors awareness of certain conversational principles to be observed enables language users to realise why the literal meaning (i.e. what is said) should be suspended and how a specific implied meaning (i.e. what is meant) could be inferred. Nerlich and Clarkes (2001) regard

conversational implicatures as generators of ambiguity, because usually speakers attempt to convey more information than expressed in their utterances and, simultaneously, hearers tend to read more into what the speakers say. The two researchers point out that Grice (1975) himself viewed ambiguity created by implicatures as a transgression of the Cooperative Principle, but argued that ambiguity often permeates in daily exchanges and adds flavour to a conversation. It is common knowledge that ambiguity is widely generated by polysemy and that it increases with the number of possible meanings of a word or phrase: A sentence containing n words each of which is m-times polysemous will in principle have n x m potential readings. It is commonly thought that context will serve to disambiguate the senses of a polysemous word. But if polysemy is ubiquitous, the disambiguating context will itself most likely also be many-ways ambiguous. It is not surprising, therefore, that disambiguation is a major issue in natural language processing. What is surprising is that for human language users, disambiguation, most of the time, is not an issue at all (Taylor 2003: 647-648). Polysemy and ambiguity are intertwined in many speech situations and comprehenders need contextual or background knowledge clues to produce the adequate interpretation of the polysemous or ambiguous lexeme or phrase. Polysemy occurs in utterances which may yield (at least) two possible readings, usually a literal and a figurative one. In an example like: My wife has laundered money, the hearer will instantly infer that the discussion is about illegally-obtained money transferred to offshore accounts; yet, if the speaker uses this expression literally the hearer may instantiate the scenario of the wife who simply happened to wash, by mistake, a certain amount of paper money, left in the some pocket. 6. Pun analysis In the lines to come, we will analyse a set of puns in terms of relexicalisation, polysemy and intended ambiguity and point out how such linguistic phenomena are triggerers of humorous effects. 6.1. all right now Did you hear about the guy whose left side was cut off? Hes all right now! The humorous effect generated by this pun is based on an additional meaning allotted to the expression all right. If decontextualised, the salient meaning of this phrase, usually indicates somebody/ something being in good health or condition. In the pun under discussion, keeping in mind that this phrase is preceded by a construction which includes the word left (the antonym of the word right), it is worth noticing that the second meaning of the sentence is emphasised by splitting the expression into its two constitutive parts: all, which now refers to the individuals body as a whole, and right, which functions merely as a locative-directional adverb. This is an instance of relexicalisation of the expression all right, performed by dividing the phrase into constituents and analysing each constituent individually. This process prompts the comprehender into activating different meanings than those brought to mind when occurring as a common collocation. What is worth emphasising is that the pun accommodates both meanings, yet only one reading is likely to

trigger laughter. Thus, when analysing the expression all right as a whole, the statement is interpreted as follows: there is a guy whose left side was cut off, yet now he is in a good state of health; once re-lexicalisation applies, the interpretation unexpectedly changes to: there is a guy whose left side was cut off, therefore he can only make use of his right side now, the only one he has got. 6.2. Keep off the grass There was a sign on the lawn at a drug rehab centre that said: Keep off the grass! This pun is performed by means of relexicalisation, which involves reinterpretation of the expression to keep off something, by reassessing the independent meanings of its constitutive parts. The likely humorous effect of the pun is secured by the two possible ways of interpreting the word grass, namely the common wild plants with narrow green leaves and stems that are eaten by cattle, horses, sheep versus a specific type of drug, i.e. marijuana. Consequently, laughter is triggered by the possibility of reading the message both as a restriction on consuming drugs (a meaning accommodated by its emergence in the context of a drug rehab centre), and as an interdiction to step on the lawn surrounding the rehab centre. 6.3. it hit me I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me With this pun, the more salient meaning of the idiom it hit me, readable as it suddenly occurred to me, undergoes the process of relexicalisation, which subsequently discloses the less expected interpretation provided by the literal meaning of the verb to hit. Hence, the pun firstly accommodates the idiomatic meaning of the expression it hit me, generating the interpretation that, although initially the speaker did not understand why the size of the baseball was progressively increasing, he/she then suddenly figured out the reason why this uncanny event occurred. Through relexicalisation, the punster compels the comprehender to envisage the literal meaning of the verb to hit, namely to strike somebody or something with the hand or with an object, thus switching the interpretation of the utterance to: while the speaker was trying to figure out why the baseball was getting bigger, it the baseball struck him/her in the head or other part of the body (the increasing size of the baseball was the natural outcome of its speedily approaching its target/victim). The opportunity to espouse this second interpretation is favoured by placing the expression it hit me in the context of a baseball match, which evinces the punsters witticism. 6.4. looking into it A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it. This pun employs relexicalisation in order to provide an additional meaning at the expense of the already existent, more salient idiomatic meaning of the expression to look into something, namely to investigate or examine something. Consequently, instead of analyzing the utterance solely from the perspective of the police being asked to make inquiries and find out the person responsible for the misdemeanour and the circumstances under which the respective hole appeared in the wall, comprehenders are alternatively supplied with a second interpretation, prompted by the

literal meaning of the set phrase. Humour is thus generated by the idea of the police peeping through the hole found in the nudist camp wall. 6.5. see right through you

Never lie to an x-ray technician. They can see right through you. This pun relies on the relexicalisation of a fixed expression for humorous purposes. The salient meaning of the idiom to see through somebody allows for a primary interpretation of the utterance as a strong piece of advice to never lie to x-ray technicians, who are stereotypically regarded as capable of digging out the innermost truth, unreachable to the naked eye. In this case, the notion of lying is foregrounded, thus favouring strengthening of the salient meaning. Should emphasis be laid on the persons career he/she is an x-ray technician relexicalisation takes place and subsequently discloses the literal interpretation of the expression: as shown in the image accompanying the pun, the utterance might adequately designate an x-ray technician who, with the aid of proper equipment, could probe into the innermost parts of the human body. 7. Delexicalisations Delexicalisation is a subcategory of relexicalisation, which operates an interference with the salient meaning of collocations and fixed expressions. When employed in a collocation such as steal a glance, for example, the verb to steal partly loses its literal meaning of taking something that belongs to another person without permission and usually secretly and comes to be interpreted as obtaining something quickly or without being noticed. Through delexicalisation, words are envisaged as parts of collocations or fixed expressions, devoid of individual meaning, and then relexicalised so as to denote their literal meaning. The next two puns illustrate the way delexicalisation works.

7.1. Take your pulse versus Take after your father - Now, let me take your pulse! - Butdont I need it?! - You really take after your father. - Well, yes. Im trying to be polite. I always let him take first. The potential humorous effect of these puns stems from the likely misinterpretation of the verb to take by the comprehenders. More specifically, in the expressions take somebodys pulse and take after somebody, the verb is delexicalised, that is, depleted of its meaning, and only acts as a constitutive part of an expression whose overall meaning is retrieved from the lexicon as one single unit. Hence, due to its frequency, the delexicalised meaning is most likely to be generated first, thus conveying the interpretations: let me check your pulse, i.e. if it is regular, how many beats per minute it records and respectively you really resemble your father both in appearance and in character. Laughter is triggered by the deliberate relexicalisation of these expressions, performed by the hearers who perceive the verb to take and all the other words in the idioms as separate units with individual meanings ultimately combined so as to render the overall meaning of the expressions. In the first pun, by asking the rhetorical question about his/her needing to have a pulse in order to survive, the interlocutor treats the idiom take your pulse as a combination of two separate units: get hold of / remove and your pulse. The expression employed in the second pun undergoes the same cognitive process as carried out by the comprehender, in the sense that the interlocutors reply generates a radically different interpretation than the expected one, namely that of removing or seizing something, an unspecified object or entity, or parts of it, only after the father has got hold of some as well. 8. Reconstruction Reconstructions are reformulations or reversals of allegedly frozen expressions or saying with a view to generating an expectation-challenging, humorous effect upon the audience. 8.1. Time wounds all heels

This is an example of near pun engendered via reconstruction of an original version of a saying, which is rendered in a novel, expectation-challenging form so as to generate ambiguity and humour. Apart from being a near pun, in which only the modified variant is available to the comprehender, while the original version is to be still inferred, this wordplay is also an instantiation of spoonerism, which challenges the hearer to pick up the removed pieces and set them back into place so as to reconstruct the puzzle. Given that a spoonerism is based on the inter-changeability of the initial sounds of several words in a certain expression, one can easily recognize and formulate the dictum alluded to, which has been altered by means of reconstruction, namely Time heals all wounds. 8.2. Feet smell and noses run Some peoples noses and feet are built backwards: their feet smell and their noses run. This pun can be envisaged as a special type of reconstruction, because it represents an intriguing reversal of certain items of common knowledge about the functions that feet and respectively noses fulfil as significant parts of our bodies; this reversal is overtly pointed out from the beginning by the use of the word backwards, which inherently calls to mind the idea of opposite or abnormal order or direction. Hence, the nose does not perform an olfactory function, neither do the feet which smell, as the expression can only be read as the feet emanate an unpleasant odour. Similarly, running is normally an activity one performs with his/her feet, yet when someones nose runs, it does not indicate the speedy covering of a specific distance, but the mundane, even distasteful function of generating snot. 9. Exact puns

Exact puns heavily rely on linguistic phenomena such as homonymy, homophony and polysemy, whose workings in language games and whose potential humorous effects will be analysed in the examples to come. 9.1. Control his pupils There was once a cross-eyed teacher who couldnt control his pupils Yus (2003) emphasises that the perlocution of puns upon an intended audience varies in compliance with the number of relevant interpretations that can be assigned to the puns in question. In the given context of occurrence, both meanings of the pun are equally appropriate, given the speakers deliberate intention to generate ambiguity and the comprehenders expected inability to choose one single interpretation for want of a well-defined context or a piece of shared knowledge between addresser and addressee. The introductory expression There was once a signals that what is about to follow is likely to provide new information for the hearer, thus facing the hearer with the impossibility of discarding one meaning and focusing on the other, which leads to the humorous effect of the pun. The ambiguity of this utterance originates in the use of the homonyms both homophones and homographs: pupil, meaning a child taught in school versus pupil, meaning the dark circular opening in the eye that becomes smaller in bright light and larger in the dark, in combination with the expression cross-eyed teacher, which provides the possibility of a double interpretation depending on the foregrounded element. Thus, one possible meaning can be derived from foregrounding the feature cross-eyed, which collocates with the second homonym defined above, namely pupil, understood as circular opening in the eye. The newly emerged meaning of this collocation turns the utterance into a description of a person who, irrespective of their being a teacher, uncontrollably and permanently turns both his eyes or rather the pupils as constitutive parts of his eyes inward towards the nose. The other meaning is made salient precisely by the persons career choice he is a teacher which perfectly fits into the semantic field of the first homonym (pupil as child) and consequently enables the instantiation of the image of a school teacher (his being cross-eyed loses in salience) who is unable to exert authority over his class and to prevent students from behaving in an unruly, insubordinate way. 9.2. subordinate clauses Santas helpers are subordinate clauses In compliance with the claims set forth by Yus (2003) and Van Mulken (2005), this pun allows only one interpretation which can render the utterance relevant and meaningful; the other meaning, which is the salient one, only enables revealing the humorous streak in the pun. In terms of salience, the pun could be assessed according to Gioras standpoint, who argues that jokes in general and puns in particular have more than one coded meaning but at least one highly salient meaning, which is activated faster, accidentally resulting in contextual misfit, allowing for the next coded meaning to reach sufficient levels of activation as well (Giora 2003: 169).

Gioras evaluation of salience and Yuss estimation of relevance (Yus 2003: 1298-1329) partially overlap. With the pun under discussion, the salient meaning of the punch line coincides with the relevance provided by enacting verbal confusion and setting up deliberate ambiguity. Understanding subordinate clauses as specific syntactic constructions that are in a relation of subordination towards main clauses, known to display specific syntactic properties and being connected to the main clauses by specific cohesive devices does not prove relevant given the context in which this collocation occurs. Such a definition does not seem salient either, as it appears blatantly inaccurate that this interpretation fails to display any logical connection with Santas helpers. Consequently, comprehenders need to provide some additional interpretation in congruence with the context, which is likely to prompt them to regard subordinate as a determiner, namely a synonym for assistant or deputy, which pertain to the same semantic field as helpers. In addition, clauses is a newly-coined common noun in the plural, derived from the widely acknowledged proper name Santa Claus. 9.3. Mercedes bends

He drove his expensive car into a tree and found out how the Mercedes bends. The humorous core of this pun resides in homophony. Being an exact pun, this multimodal word game it exploits the polyfunctional use of two word forms, which sound alike: bends, the third person singular form of the verb to bend and Benz, the proper name which denotes, together with Mercedes, the name of a famous, highly rated car brand. Yet, while the use of the third person singular (bends) is accommodated by the context of driving a car into a tree and provokes laughter through the comprehenders instantly associating it with the missing part of the brand name (Benz), the free inter-changeability of the two words may lead to an inaccurate bona fide construction, as the replacement of bends by Benz may only generate an ungrammatical, verbless sentence 9.4. in a tie Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

The linguistic phenomenon that fosters the generation of this pun is polysemy, or particularly the double meaning that can be assigned to the word tie when taken individually and respectively inside the idiom in a tie. The humorous ambiguity is thus generated by the witty association of the key words: silk worms, race and tie. The first meaning that can be derived from this utterance relies on the interpretation of tie within the frame of the respective idiom, namely as the outcome of the race that the two silk worms participated in, at the end of which they crossed the finish line at the very same time. Laughter is triggered, however, by the second, less salient interpretation of the utterance, springing from the rather unusual nature of the two racers they are silk worms -, which inevitably leads to the commoner meaning of the word tie, that of a strip of material worn round the neck under the collar and tied with a knot in front. The image likely to be activated by the comprehender is that of two worms racing to spin silk around them, which will ultimately become the fabric in a silk tie. 9.5. marriage is a sentence

To some, marriage is a wordto others, a sentence. The first interpretation that comes to mind when looking at this pun is the one prompted by the obvious partonomy-based connection between word and sentence Along this line of reasoning, the utterance can be analyzed metaphorically and paraphrased as: to some people, marriage is not just a word, but a full-fledged sentence, such analogy operating a mapping between the complexity and harmony achievable among sentence constituents and the balance and bliss experienced by an accomplished couple. On the other hand, however, the visual tends to strengthen a second possible interpretation, according to which sentence is no longer definable as a set of words, but as an inflicted punishment, an indictment, drawing an analogy between marriage and imprisonment, metonymically reinforced by the stripes on the bridegrooms outfit.

9.6. the end of the sentence A prisoners favourite punctuation mark is the period. It marks the end of his sentence. The polysemy of the word sentence generates the humorous effect of this pun as a connection is established between the punctuation mark that is normally placed at the end of an assertive sentence the period and the status of the person who employs this punctuation mark. At a first reading, if we are to ignore the persons status of prisoner, the utterance simply seems to state the obvious, i.e. the period is used to end peoples sentences. Yet, when knowledge on the period marking the closure of a stage/event applies to prisoners, a second meaning of the word sentence becomes salient, leading to the equally commonsensical yet humorous reading that completing a period of imprisonment marks the end of a prisoners time in jail. 9.7. a-salted peanut

Two peanuts were walking in a tough neighbourhood and one of them was a-salted. This pun exploits homophony, which is used to deliberately create confusion between the allegedly poetic and archaic construction a-salted (the contemporary form would have been a salted one) and assaulted, given their phonological similarity. This line of thought may prompt the comprehender to interpret the utterance as referring to two humanised peanuts going for a stroll, one of whom is strewn with salt, Yet, after carefully analysing the attention-catching image, indicative of some tough neighbourhood in which the two peanuts loiter about, a second possible interpretation emerges, according to which one of the peanuts has had the misfortune of being violently attacked and possibly even mugged, a scenario reinforced by the open purse abandoned on the macadam.. 9.8. two-tired A bicycle cant stand on its own because it is two-tired. This pun is yet another instantiation of homophony-based ambiguity. The written version of this utterance enables the reader to primarily understand it as a reasonable and somehow obvious explanation why a bicycle cannot stand on its own, namely because of its having only two wheels,

placed one in front of the other, which fails to secure its balance when placed vertically. However, a second meaning is also made available by replacing the construction two-tired with its homophonous counterpart too tired thus inviting the comprehender to assign human features to the bicycle, which apparently cannot stand in an upright position because of sleep deprivation and exhaustion. 9.10. Ill go on a head Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat says to the other: You stay here, Ill go on a head. The humorous effect of this pun stems from the punsters toying not only with homophony, but also with the boundaries between words, while providing a context meant to accommodate both instances of wordplay. The first interpretation of this pun is the rather obvious continuation to what the hat initially suggests to her peer, namely her intention to leave first, readable as: Ill go on ahead, implying that speaking hat will pursue her journey on her own while the other hat should stay on the rack. Novelty and even humorous surprise is triggered by the use of the homophone of ahead, which can be obtained merely by dividing it into the indefinite article a and the noun head. Intriguingly enough, this interpretation can be made salient by the context, since the very purpose of a hat is to go on a (persons) head. 9.11. resisting a rest Police were called to a day-care centre where a three-year-old was resisting a rest. The pun restructures the collocation resisting arrest, by replacing the noun arrest with the homophonous construction achieved from the decomposition of the noun itself into the determiner a and the noun rest. If verbally expressed, this utterance is most likely to be very perplexing, because it would undoubtedly be interpreted as referring to a three-year-old child using violent force in order to avoid being taken into custody of the police, given the salience of the expression resisting arrest. However, in its written form, the pun also fosters a second interpretation, much more consistent with a nursery context, namely the police being called at a day-care centre so as to try soothe a little boy unwilling to go to sleep and very adamant in his refusal to take his midday rest. 10. Concluding remarks The present paper has endeavoured to supply an analysis of nineteen puns in the light of the most frequently-encountered linguistic strategies and mechanisms of transgressing conventional language barrier. Particular emphasis has been laid on the role played by relexicalisation, delexicalisation, ambiguity and polysemy. These linguistic devices have been examined in both verbal and multimodal texts, where expectation-challenging, often mind-boggling, visuals complement the verbal text in an endeavour to create humorous effect by language manoeuvring. Daniela Sorea danasorea06@gmail.com

Alexandra Stoica
REFERENCES Attardo, Salvatore. 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humour. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Giora, Rachel. 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and Conversation. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech arts, Cole et al. University College London, pp. 41-58 Nerlich, Brigitte and Clarke, David D. 2001. Ambiguities we live by: Towards a pragmatics of polysemy. Journal of Pragmatics 33, pp. 1-20 Partington, Alan Scott. 2008. A linguistic account of wordplay: The lexical grammar of punning in Journal of Pragmatics 41, pp. 1794-1809. Sorea, Daniela. 2007. Pragmatics: some cognitive perspectives. Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti. Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in Interaction: an Introduction to Pragmatics. London & New York: Longman. Taylor, John R. 2003. Polysemys paradoxes. Journal of Pragmatics 25, pp. 637-655 Van Mulken, M. et al.2005. Puns, relevance and appreciation in advertisements. Journal of Pragmatics 37, pp. 707721 Yus. 2003. Humor and the search for relevance. Journal of Pragmatics 35, pp.1295-1331.