Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.32914/mcpr.12.1.5
PRAGMA-LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS OF HUMORIC CONTENT ABOUT THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Iva Borić
; Grimms Institute, Zagreb, Croatia
Jelena Hadžić
; Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia & Alma Mater Europaea, Maribor, Slovenia
Abstract
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many unusual and unexpected situations in all areas of life, including language, to which almost every Croatian citizen has been exposed. This social paradigm shift exemplifies the fact that context changes the meaning of a language utterance. In other words, ordinary semantics aside, new semantic meanings have come up which haven’t existed before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred.
The context by which we decipher the meaning is the key for the pragma-linguistic content analysis explored in this paper. Its purpose is to research the types of conversational maxims which are broken in humoristic utterances. The content consists of examples collected in March 2021 from a pool of interpersonal and group communication sources. Using humor in language as a narrative shines a light on tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, implication etc. Without them, we would lose a chance to broaden our horizons, i.e. to explore the area between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Seeing as most humor innately breaks some maxims, the possible interpretations of the analysed utterances illustrate how context and maxim-breaking as basic principles of rational talk bring about new meanings and comic effect (or an additional comical trigger, different from the existing one, in a new context).
Keywords
humour; pandemics; conversational implicatures; conversational maxim; content analysis from pragma-linguistic and communicology perspective
Hrčak ID:
256892
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2021.
Visits: 1.152 *