Use of Puns and the Literal Translation of Words and Idioms in Humorous Discourse

Abstract

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Puns revolve around two or more semantically incompatible meanings as they are formed by polysemic and homophonic words used in a certain context. According to the incongruity theory of humour, humour is created due to incongruity between expectation and reality. All kinds of puns are based on ambiguity principles. This study aims to describe and compare lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactical and idiomatic puns and literal translations used in the context of Urdu sitcoms “Hum sub Umeed say hain” and “Hasb-e-Haal” by the help of descriptive-analytical method. Five episodes of each sitcom are analyzed. The rational of choosing these programs is that they revolve around important social issues and sensitive political themes to highlight and eradicate those problems. Findings indicate that lexical and idiomatic puns occur the most in our data, whereas morphological ambiguity is present least in number. The cause of ambiguity of more than a quarter of the data is due to literal translations and code switching. Since little work (and none to my knowledge in Urdu) has been done on puns and working of humorous literal translations of words and idioms in the context of sitcom and comedy discourse, this paper can be a linguistic contribution to the areas of media and humour studies.