LANGUAGE MEANS OF CREATING HUMOROUS EFFECT IN THE NOVELS OF T. PRATCHETT

Abstract

The article focuses on analyzing the language means of creating humorous effect in the novels by famous British fantasy novels writer Terry Pratchett. To begin with, the author outlines the theoretical background of studying humor as a complex philosophical, aesthetic, social and historic phenomenon. The article briefly highlights the fact of the existing difference between such terms as humor, comic and comism, the latter being a broader notion. It has been proved that the key role in creating humorous effect belongs to verbal means. These occur on all language levels, including phonetical, lexical-semantic and grammar-syntactic.

Particular attention is paid to puns – figures of speech based on the play of qwords and targeted at producing humorous effect. The author comes to the conclusion that puns present a number of challenges to be identified and decoded and later, if necessary, translated. These challenges are related not only to general background knowledge, but also to specifity of the language means involved in the pun.

Among the phonological humor-creating means the author points out dialect variation of pronunciation, including strong Scottish accent, transcribed in the novel as the way to provide characteristics to the protagonists, whereas lexical-semantic means include antiphrasis, periphrasis, hyperbole, simili as most productive ones. On the syntax level the author differentiates asyndeton, aposiopesis and polisyndeton.

The article brings forward the idea, that a comprehensive analysis the language means of creating humorous effect may serve the foundation and facilitate further study of cognitive mechanisms of humor, i.e. the mechanism of incongruence. Frames Theory, suggested by M. Minsky and his followers, may well provide methodological base for further cognition-orientated study of humor.