Přehled o publikaci

Puns are generally associated with humorous effects spawned by linguistic creativity. Understanding verbal humor involves not only mechanisms of humor per se, but also – and actually in the first place – understanding of a linguistic production as such. Discovering mechanisms of verbal humor, such as puns, therefore opens a door to the principles of meaning that are at the very core of our linguistic capacities. As Vyvyan Evans (2016) puts it, “puns are incredibly complex requiring your brain to perform exquisite gymnastics in putting together carefully choreographed aspects of word sounds and meanings in novel ways.” The focus of the present talk is on Japanese puns, dajare, and its objective is twofold. First, it aims at introducing dajare as a product of centuries long tradition of meta-linguistic work with the linguistic system of Japanese language and its intertwining with the Japanese culture. Second, after presenting some most common forms of Japanese dajare, I will attempt to introduce a model of cognitive mechanisms related to understanding dajare, with an ambition to map to other kinds of linguistic production as well. The model will be presented from a hearer’s (not a speaker’s) perspective with focus on the process of interpretation, rather than creativity. It is grounded in the theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM) as a part of a broader cognitive linguistics movement.