Punning Wordplay in Czech Advertising Discourse

Abstract

This account of punning wordplay in Czech advertising discourse draws on the recent popularity of pun and the research, for which the theory of lexical priming provides lexico-grammatical framework. The corpus-based evidence of combinatorial behaviour of linguistic features, and the processes behind reinterpretations and sense selections aid an analysis of the reasons why many pun attempts failed to achieve the desired effect, and at the same time explain which features are successful in generating amusement in Czech puns. The processes of relexicalisation and reworking were observed in a considerable number of instances in older and more recent advertising puns, the sources of ambiguity identified, and puns were compared, contrasted and classified. At the same time a shift from reliance on one ambiguous feature to employing multiple psycholinguistic phenomena and their combinations has been identified.

Keywords

• Relexicalisation
• reworking
• lexical cascading
• collocation
• homonymy