Lexical language play in “The big bang theory” sitcom

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of language play and its role in achieving humorous effect in humorous discourse. The authors start with considering the notion of language play understood as creative, non-standard usage of any linguistic units and / or categories to create witty utterances. To the characteristics of language play belong those of secondary character, wit, conventionality, artificiality, associativity, substitutiveness, accentuality, relevance, individuality, aesthetics, the comic effect, etc. Language play is viewed as one of the main ways of achieving humorous effect in humorous discourse, including the genre of situational comedy. The study is based on a popular American sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”. The authors come to the conclusion that the characters of the sitcom use in their jokes language play techniques at all the levels of language structure: phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic, the most frequent being those of lexical level. Such means of lexical language play as (in decreasing order of frequency) simile, periphrasis, metaphor, hyperbole, personification and referring to an inanimate object, allusion and citation, antonomasia, homonymy, combination of incompatible words, and metonymy are considered.