Page 22 - The Language of Humour

‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’ 9
will be used for stretches of language longer than the sentence, in
particular the ways that conversation works. Once people are involved
in discourse, it is not enough to be able to structure the language in the
right form, they must also understand conventions about what is
appropriate to say in various situations. For example, in a sketch
involving a doctor and a patient, the doctor concludes the interview by
saying ‘If you have any further worries, don’t hesitate to ask.’ The
patient leans forward anxiously and says ‘If the universe is expanding
all the time, where does it all go?’ Here it is a matter not of
misinterpreting the meaning of the word ‘worries’ but of knowing the
sort of worries that a doctor deals with. (Unit 3 looks at incongruity in
language use.)

Phonology

Many jokes are based on the fact that there can be two possible
interpretations of the same group of sounds. One of the earliest riddles
which children hear and tell is:

What’s black and white and red/read all over? A newspaper.

The term homophone refers to words that are pronounced the same but
spelt differently: for example, ‘saw’, ‘sore’. The possibility for
confusion can happen only in spoken language, as the two words look
quite distinct when written down. (These are distinct from homonyms,
which are identical in spelling and pronunciation, but have a different
meaning. For example, ‘saw’ meaning looked at, and ‘saw’ meaning a
tool for cutting wood.) There are many homophones in the English
language, because the English system of spelling is not based on
representing each sound or phoneme with a distinct letter or symbol.
Sometimes there is just a similarity of sound.

Headline: Cloning Around

Here the set phrase ‘Clowning around’ is altered by using a
word of slightly different sound,
It is possible to find many potential ambiguities because of the
way that English vowel sounds, in particular, are pronounced in
connected speech. Unlike a language like Italian, unstressed syllables in
English tend to reduce the vowel sound to a schwa . It is hardly
surprising that there is confusion about how to spell words, because all