3. LEXICAL RESOURCES
3.2. SEMANTIC OVERLAP
(11) [In a Bed & Breakst in France] The genuineanticsin your room come from our mily castle.
Ronald Reagan (the then American president) was holding a press conference in Washington to discuss domestic issues. Out of the blue, a journalist stood up and posed this question: "Mr. President, what do you think ol wi kandal iti kSummit Conference in Amman?" The president had no idea what that was. Improvising, however, he responded: "I think we , but we dont declare it".
(12) [From the then Soviet Weekly] There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors.Thesewere executed over the past two years.
Kuwait University, Kuwait
The conditional sentence in (16) gives rise to a conversational implicature that constitutes the basis of the humorous script, i.e. If this is not your first visit to the USSR, you are not welcome to it. The producer was not aware of this implicature he/she only wanted to give a special welcome to first timers in the USSR. Accidental humor that derives from the overall structure of the text is coherence-based (mostly related to conversational implicature) rather than cohesion-based (e.g. reference and word order). It should be noted that whereas conditional modality may not work in contexts similar to (16) in English, it may work in some languages like Arabic (or probably Russian, with which (16) affiliates). The modality behind this in Arabic runs as follows: If you are not a first-timer, the place in question is your second home, so you do not need welcoming; however, if you are a first timer in this place, you are deserving of welcoming to it. This culture-sensitive modality can be a rich resource for accidental humor as (16) above clearly demonstrates.
4.3. MODALITY
Translation? humorous scripts,Keywords: accidental humor; intentionality; implicature; script opposition; flouting a maxim; infringing a maxim; interlingual communication.
The communicators inadvertent choice of entertaining instead of receiving results in accidental humor in the context reported in (4) above. Semantically, entertainment is a common aspect of reception, which may be considered a superordinate term that may include entertaining. The humor, however, is heightened by reversing the normal scenario or script in banning entertaining the opposite in hotel bedrooms (which may function as natural venues for such activity), while licensing it in hotel lobbies (which may not function as possible venues for such activity). As a result of this script overlap, the intended message is turned up side down and accidental humor comes into being.
As can be seen, the humor in (3) is caused by the homonymous lexeme ass,Translation? humorous scripts which can tolerate two senses in the above context, that is, donkey or buttocks. The communicator could have avoided the ambiguity by using donkey instead of ass.
A similar Arabic example went round in Jordan in the early 1990s during the Jordanian governments lengthy deliberation over the issue of raising the state-subsidized price of bread and its serious effects on the poor. The then Jordanian Prime Minister, Abdul-Kareem Al-Kabariti, was allegedly reported to have said " ad-daf qabl al-raf " [Payment before raising] with reference to the governments intention to compensate poor milies financially before raising the price of bread. The alleged phra??????logy, which was purposely and mischievously interpreted as carrying a ual import [i.e. a miliar rule in striking a deal with a prostitute], came to be on everyones tongue in Jordan and generated considerable amusement among Jordanians. In the Jordanian culture, the ual intercourse interpretation is derived from a folkloric, stereotypical position that involves the males raising his partners legs high before entering her. The Prime Minister, given the solemnity of his statement and the seriousness of the situation, could not have been taken to contemplate the humorous script; therefore, it must have arisen from his infringing rather than flouting the maxim of Manner.
In some cases, it is not easy to determine whether the intralingual language-based humor is accidental or intentional. The following example may illustrate this point: (In the window of a Kentucky appliance store) Dont kill your wife. Let our washing machine do the dirty work. On the one hand, given this advertising context, one may reasonably assume that the producer is not aware of the humor in the above text, as he/she is promoting the product in question as a source of relief (rather than a source of mortality) for housewives. If this is so, then what we have here is accidental humor. On the other hand, it may be assumed that the producer is exploiting the maxim of manner to generate humor, in an attempt to break the ice and create an amiable atmosphere which may encourage potential customers to go shopping at that appliance store. In most cases, however, intralingual linguistic humor is intentional. Following are some interesting examples: (On a butchers window) Let me meat your needs; (On the door of a computer store) Out for a quick byte; and (Pizza shop slogan) 7 days without pizza makes one weak. The producers of these examples intentionally invest a linguistic resource (namely homophony in English) to promote commodities by amusing potential clients.
The humor in the above example results from the communicators inadvertent employment of the verb in italics, i.e. give, which conveys the salient message of serving the food to the guard on duty more than the marginalized message of leaving the food with the guard on duty. This error succeeds in generating laughter from readers who are aware of this lexical mishap. It should be noted that interlingual humor belongs to situational rather than fictional humor (Morreall, 2004). The humor-generating situational act is unconscious on the part of the producer, but conscious on the part of the receiver. As for the text itself, it is a victim of accidental humor, which derives mainly from interlingual rather than intralingual script opposition and overlap; it is largely the legitimate child of interlingual linguistic mishaps (for intralingual mishaps, however, see Chiaro 1992), which are rooted in language itself rather than in social reality that finds its way through language, as is the case in intentionhumorous scriptsal humor.
The humor in (7) derives from the producers filling an English lexical gap based on the lexicon of German (the source language), in which the verb alarmieren means to alert and counts as a lse friend of the English verb to alarm. By contrast, English employs the two verbs sound the alarm and alarm to mean different things. In other words, there is a lexical gap in English because the effected object in the collocation sound the alarm cannot be verbalized for the same import. Being unaware of this lexical gap, however, the producer verbalizes the effected object, thus causing laughter by bringing to the foreground a humorous script.
Generally speaking, there have been two approaches to the study of humor: the functional and the descriptive. The functional approach has emphasized the socio-psychological aspects of joke-telling (e.g. Benton 1988; Draister 1994). The descriptive approach foregrounds semantic and structural properties of jokes (e.g. Goldstein, 1970; Raskin, 1985; Attardo, 1994, 2001; Attardo and Raskin, 1991). Regardless of the approach, there is a consensus among humor researchers that joking, which typically results in laughter, is essentially an intentional act that evolves from both the joker and the joke itself, and is expected to be of interest to the listener, who usually turns into a key player once the joke has been cracked.
(13) [In a Sari Park] Elephants Please Stay In Your Car.
Similarly, the implicit reference marker you and its explicit, co-referential anaphor your in (13) il to refer exophorically to people visiting the park, as intended by the translator, and, instead, the explicit anaphor your picks up elephants as a textual referent, thus causing the humorous script. Further, example (13) indicates the importance of punctuation as a cohesion device. Had the producer of (13) used an exction point after Elephants, he/she would have ruled out the humorous reading, i.e. the anaphor your could, in that case, only be interpreted exophorically.
Despite the functional difference between intentional and accidental humor, script opposition seems to lie at the heart of both. It seems that humor has to evolve and, subsequently, derive from an enterprise of incongruity. The overt script at the beginning of the (un)intended joke must be overridden by a covert script that unfolds when the punch line is reached. However, whereas intentional humor is usually the output of fictional thinking (i.e. a reflex of social (subjective) rather than objective reality), accidental humor is the output of mishaps in actual communication (both intra- and inter-lingual), which derives from a real rather than fictional setting.
Modality, which can either refer to the way the language user views the world around him in terms of different degrees of certainty (epistemic modality) or his attitude toward social ctors such as obligation and permission (deontic modality), probably constitutes the subtlest resource for accidental humor. English modality may be expressed grammatically by employing modal verbs such asmustin John must resign or semantically by paraphrasing the modal verb lexically as in It is necessary that John resign. The subtlety of this resource in accidental humor stems from our inability to pinpoint it because the humorous script may relate to the semantics of the overall text rather than a particular word or phrase that, in other resources of accidental humor, may function as a lexical or grammatical trigger. The following examples illustrate this point:
In the following pages, there will be an attempt to explore some of the linguistic resources that may improvise accidental humor in international public notices displayed in English translation in different parts of the world. These resources can be divided into lexical and grammatical.
In many cases, accidental humor results from the producers inability to observe overlapping in the meaning of semantically related words. Following are some examples:
A different picture is obtained in accidental humor, where the speakers intention to amuse is lacking. The humor is accidentally conveyed and, as a result, laughter is generated. An interesting example is cited in Thomas (1995), in which the Liberal M.P. Mr. Cyril Smith who, speaking on a radio program in defense of the immigrant population in Britain, claimed to be someone who " does a very very great deal of work amongst the immigrant population I had sixteen of em for lunch at the House of Commons last Tuesday ". What he said generated laughter from the audience although he iled to figure out why it was funny and insisted that the invitation script was the only possible interpretation of his utterance. Clearly, Mr. Smith infringed the Maxim of Manner (namely the sub-maxim Avoid ambiguity) without intending to do so, hence the laughter from the audience. Technically, an infringement of a maxim contrasts with a flouting of a maxim in terms of speakers intentions: the former involves the speakers awareness that he is exploiting a maxim of conversation for a communicative purpose, whereas the latter lacks this awareness on the part of the speaker, i.e. the exploitation of the maxim is accidental it is not intended by the speaker (for a detailed account of observance and non-observance of maxims of conversation, see Grice 1975 and Thomas 1995). Had Mr. Smith intended to generate humor, he would have been taken to flout the Maxim of Manner for a communicative purpose.
On the other hand, homonymous words are those ambiguous words whose multiple senses are completely unrelated to each other; for example, the word sage can accidentally mean a wise man and a kind of herb. The source of humor in example (3) below is homonymy:
In some cases, fortuitous humor is caused by the producers erroneous use of a lexeme that bears some morpho-phonological resemblance to the target word. Following are three illustrative examples:
Accidental humor is unintentional and is, in our case, an immediate consequence of the producers imperfect command of the foreign language. Therefore, it is a clear example of infringing the maxim of manner accidentally, that is, the communicator ils to employ a phra??????logy that conveys the message embodied in the source language public notice in his/her English version. The English versions may be viewed as mere attempts at communicating in the foreign language (English in this case) rather than translations proper. The following example is illustrative: (At a Budapest zoo) Please do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food,giveit to the guard on duty.
Lexical gaps, which refer to the holes in the semantic blanket in any given language (Rabin 1958; Ivir 1977; Dagut 1981), are a common feature of all human languages, because that blanket can never be intact. This does not mean that human languages may variously not be capable of expressing some propositions due to lexical gaps. In ct, every language has the ability to improvise ways and means to fill in the lexical gaps communicatively, i.e. independently of lexical compression where one specific lexeme is employed. In some cases, accidental humor results from the communicators inability to handle lexical gaps in the target language (English in our case). Following are two illustrative examples:
A clear assumption in this is that accidental humor resulting from attempting to communicate in a foreign language is a linguistic mishap that involves socio-cultural implications. On the one hand, it enhances intercultural communication by introducing an amiable atmosphere among interactants belonging to different cultures and, subsequently, strengthens social relations. An example that comes to my mind involves a man Jordanian professor (who lacks enough English proficiency) posing the question How is your under to a man Australian professor (a native speaker of English) at a cocktail party. They were stuck at that point in the conversation and, being nearby, I was summoned to explain what that question meant. When I pointed out that the question (a direct literal translation from Arabic) was about ual potency, not only did the three of us engage in laughter but we made it public to several other invitees who joined in the laughter, which sparked off friendly conversations on relevant topics. On the other hand, linguistic mishaps in interlingual communication may create both dismay and prejudice on the part of native speakers. At language conferences and elsewhere, I often heard cynical remarks made by native speakers of English about the English used in public signs and notices in foreign lands. For instance, recently an American professor at a language conference in Turkey told me how the guards stopped her from taking pictures of some public signs at an archeological site in a foreign country. She (maybe mistakenly) interpreted this as having to do with the funny English employed in the signs.
1. INTRODUCTION
4. GRAMMATICAL RESOURCES
(14) [In the lobby of a Moscow hotel across a Russian Orthodox monastery] You are welcome to visit the cemetery where mous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are burieddaily except Thursday.
The present study aims to analyze accidental humor as it manifests itself in a number of international public notices posted in English, which have been selected from Internet material (mostly from English Funniest Translations at Funny Translation Errors at The posting of English versions of native public notices in different parts of the world hardly needs an explanation, for English has become an international lingua franca in this age. This being the case, it is becoming more and more pressing for local services and businesses in most non-English speaking countries to juxtapose the native public notices with English translations.
The mishap in (1) stems from the erroneous employment of the verb enter causatively based on its mono-transitive use, e.g.enter a roomandenter a competition. However, the humor is heightened by the use of the noun woman as a collocate of enter, thus giving rise to an amusing ual reading, which emanates from the ct that the verb enter is polysemous. It could be the case that the source language allows the use of the verb corresponding to enter causatively; whereas English would require a causative verb, e.g. let a woman enter, other things being equal. Thus this is a case where polysemy interacts with grammar to produce accidental humor. Similarly, the humor in (2) is caused by the polysemous expression take advantage of, which can mean either make use of services and/or exploit financially or ually depending on context. Being unaware of this subtle polysemy, however, the communicator opted for the ambiguous expression take advantage of in the hotel context above, thus bringing forth to the foreground the unexpected script of exploiting the chambermaid ually, instead of the intended script of use of the services that the chambermaid can see to, which only remains lingering in the background.
(17) [In a hotel in Athens] Visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 A.M. daily.
Abstract
The humor in (14) is accidentally caused by the wrong placement of the adverbial phrase daily except Thursday as a post-modifier of the act of burying Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers instead of the act of visiting the cemetery. Apparently,????. the communicator wanted to avoid the awkwardness of placing the post-modifier after the appropriate act, not being aware of utilizing parentheses to enclose an awkward adverbial in such a case. At the same time, he was well aware of the moveability of adverbials in English, which, to his misfortune, made him ll in the snare of a humorous script.
As can be seen, the joke teller was working with two different thought-worlds: Arab versus American politics. On the one hand, he/she wanted to conversationally implicate that President Regan knew nothing about what was happening in the rest of the world, because he lacked a good education. To achieve this end, the joker made the journalist flout the maxim of manner by struggling with the alliterative pronunciation of the Arabic conference name, thus triggering a ual scenario that was taken at ce value by the president although it was r-fetched. In effect, the freshly emerging pronunciation goes well beyond the unfunny script (the actual Arabic name of the conference) to reach out for the humorous script (the ual interpretation). On the other hand, he/she intended to conversationally implicate, by means of lling back on President Reagans response, that Arab summit conferences were a futile enterprise that should not be taken seriously. To accomplish this goal, the joker had the president flout the maxim of relation, in order to sustain his ce-value interpretation of the journalists question. This two-stage implicature-laden contrivance succeeds in creating laughter based on both script opposition and script overlap (Raskin, 1985).
Humor or joking is essentially a collaborative social act, or construct, in the words of (Veale, 2004), where a variety of socio-cultural functions relating to the joke teller, listener and butt are all simultaneously engaged (Freud, 1960 [1905]; Bentley, 1981 [1964]; Al- Khatib, 1999). Because of its interdisciplinary nature, humor has been discussed by psychologists (Ruch, 1992), linguists (Alam, 1989; De Bruyn, 1989); discourse analysts (Sherzer, 1985; Al-Khatib, 1997), ethnographers (Sacks 1974; Apte 1985), and sociolinguists (Martineau, 1972; Benton, 1988).
Similarly, the communicator in (8), being unaware of English derivational restrictions and modelingdoernouns such as specialist and receptionist, erroneously subjects the noun method in dentistry to this derivational pattern. To his/her confusion, the wrongly coined lexeme coincided with a r-fetched homophone Methodist from the Christian religious register, thus accidentally creating a humorous script.
Similarly, the humor in (15) results from the erroneous placement of the prepositional phrase with nuts as a post-modifier of the ladies instead of its intended use as a post-modifier of cocktails. Although the mishap is triggered by mistaken word order, it would have remained an awkward rather than a humorous translation error had it not been for the polysemous word nuts. Thus, if the word nuts were replaced with cashews in (15), the humorous script would just disappear, leaving the reader with nothing but an awkward language error that could hardly merit a smile. It should be noted that attachment sites of prepositional phrases are a notorious source of ambiguity in English (for more details, see Oaks 1994, 1995).
Meaning is never made explicit in jokes it is typically worked out co-operatively between the joke teller and the listener by way of conversational implicature (Grice 1975) in a non-bona fide manner of communication (Raskin, 1985). More often than not, the joker flouts one or more of the maxims of conversation, in order to create more interest and suspense in his/her joke. By way of illustration, below is a Jordanian political joke that was heard among the Jordanian elite at the time of an Arab summit conference in Amman (1986), which was officially calledmu(Conference of Reconciliation and Agreement) by the host country (Jordan):
As can be seen in (4)-(6) above, semantic overlaps that feature various inclusion relations constitute a rich area for interlingual mishaps that create script opposition or overlap and, as a result, accidental humor. However, these overlaps dynamically interact with collocational restrictions in different contexts. In most cases, the humor instantiates because the producer ils to employ the correct word from a set of lexemes related to each other by inclusion or part-whole (e.g. hyponymy and meronymy, respectively) and, as a result, he/she lls victim to inadvertently emerging collocational and contextual humorous scripts.
Ambiguous words in English can be either polysemous or homonymous. On the one hand, polysemous words are probably the most prominent resource of accidental humor in translated public notices. A polysemous word is one that has two or more related meanings in any given language. That is to say, polysemy represents variations of the basic sense of a word. Insor as English is concerned, polysemy is so common that it is difficult to find a content word that escapes this phenomenon. The multiple senses of core words such asfoot,head,eye,chair,table,hot, etc. are only a few examples from a multitude. This pervasive property of the English lexicon provides rich ground for accidental humor while attempting to communicate messages from any given language into English, as can be illustrated in the mishaps in (1) and (2) below (henceforth the humorous words/expressions will be printed in italics):
It should be noted that polysemous and homonymous words may operate differently in accidental humor. On the one hand, polysemous words may generate humor by introducing an incongruent, but prominent, script into the context on hand, without causing lexical ambiguity (1 above), or, alternatively, by introducing an incongruent, but prominent, script into the context while maintaining lexical ambiguity. On the other hand, homonymous words cater for humor by giving rise to two competing scripts in a given context, although the humorous script usually takes precedence over the other one, as has been shown in (3) above.
Word order refers to the way words relate to each other in a sentence, which sometimes gives rise to structural ambiguity. In such cases, the wrong placement of a phrase in relation to the other constituents in the sentence usually triggers the humorous script, as can be illustrated in (14) and (15) below:
This examines accidental humor as it manifests itself in international public notices displayed in English. It shows that accidental humor, just like intentional humor, essentially stems from script opposition and script overlap (Raskin, 1985). However, it lacks intentionality, which plays a key role in contrived humor. In this way, accidental humor is based on the interaction between the text and the receiver, apart from the producer. In particular, accidental humor in interlingual communication is the output of the producers language incompetence in the target language, whereas it is the result of the producers landing in unintended ambiguity in intralingual communication. In such humor, therefore, the initiator infringes one or more maxims of conversation (Grice, 1975), unlike intentional humor, where the joke teller exploits conversational maxims for communicative purposes, in order to generate conversational implicature and, subsequently, laughter.
3.3. LEXICAL GAPS
Dept. of English
The humor in the three examples above results from the communicators confusing fit with fitting in (9), values with valuables in (10), and antics with antiques in (11). Apparently, the producers search for words in his mental lexicon was based on vague morpho-phonological similarity, which produced humorous scripts, thus effectively landing him/her in the happy trap of accidental humor.
(16) [On the door of a Moscow hotel room] If this is your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it.
The anaphoric reference marker these in (12) refers back to Soviet Republic painters and sculptors, thus effectively telling the reader that they were executed over the past two years, thereby generating humor. In terms of intentions, the communicator wanted the reference marker these to refer textually to the distant referent Arts or, perhaps, exophorically to "the painters and sculptors works". However, this intended reference script ils in the presence of a close, eligible textual referent in (12), i.e. 15,000 Republic painters and sculptors. Although the emerging script opposition is readily resolvable in terms of world knowledge, it succeeds in producing laughter from receivers.
(15) [In a Tokyo bar] Special cocktails for the ladieswith nuts.
3.4. MORPHO-PHONOLOGICAL SIMILARITY
4.1 REFERENCE
As can be observed, polysemy may sometimes produce unambiguous utterances in accidental humor (example 1 above), although the intended script in the utterance is contextually recoverable by the reader. That is, given the context of (1), the reader can readily work out the producers intended script, despite the ct that the humor is generated by the linguistically based accidental script in the utterance. In such cases, therefore, script opposition is interactionally rather than linguistically recovered. In other cases of polysemy (example 2 above), the utterance will linguistically tolerate two scripts, i.e. will produce ambiguity, with one script coming to the foreground while the other staying in the background. In both cases of polysemy, the foreground background distinction is useful for differentiating between the prominently humorous script on the one hand and the intended, but linguistically iled, humor-free script on the other. Whereas the former always resides in the foreground, the latter invariably lingers in the background.
[In a Zurich hotel] Because of the impropriety ofentertainingguests of the opposite in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose.
3.1. AMBIGUITY
2. THE PRESENT STUDY
Similarly, the humorous script in (17) stems from the translators option for a modality that embraces obligation instead of possibility toward the state-of-afirs in question, i.e. complaining at the hotel office. Therefore, what is modally supposed to be a visitors right is modally presented as a visitors obligation by the communicator. Again, this may have to do with culture-sensitive modality, which aims to urge diss
As for the humor in (5) and (6) above, it arises from the translators confusion about the sense relations in the set: trousers clothes laundry. While trousers are a hyponym of clothes (i.e. a kind of clothes), trousers and clothes are potential items of laundry. Neither of them can replace the common noun laundry, which may include clothing and non-clothing items. In (5), the verb drop may collocate with laundry to mean leave your laundry; however, it is not supposed to collocate with trousers to mean take off your trousers at the dry cleaners, hence the accidental humor. Similarly, the humor in (6) is triggered by the collocation leave your clothes at the Rome public laundry and is subsequently heightened by wishing the then nude customer to have a good time on that afternoon, which represents the punch line, without which the ual script would not be part of the meaning of the text. That is to say, the second part of the text constitutes a script-switch trigger that instantiates the ual reading, whose absence would have weakened the fortuitous humor tremendously.
(10) [In a Paris hotel elevator] Please leave yourvaluesat the front desk.
Mishaps in reference may alter the intended meaning and give rise to various humorous scripts. Examples (12) and (13) below illustrate this point:
4.2. WORD ORDER
Source: http://www.cpxserver.com/2012/02/18/translation-humorous-scripts/
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