Crosslinguistic puns

Puns are amusing in that it creates rooms for ambiguity. Meanings derived from puns may refer to two different and conflicting propositions (Attardo 1994). In media communication, audio and textual presentation collaborates to construct puns. As far as puns in crosslinguistic contexts are concerned, the two readings could be derived from two different languages.

Interpreting puns thereby requires competence in two languages. How puns are successfully delivered in media discourse consequently unveils the ideologizing process of English.

An example of puns shows deliberate discursive strategies of swaying between

profanity in one language and a totally innocent phrase in another. The deployment of codeswitching is related to Hill‘s discussion on Mock Spanish (2008). Hills outlines 4 tactics

of appropriation on using Spanish in American-English contexts. Euphemism, one of the four tactics, addresses how English vulgar terms are replaced with Spanish words. The situation can work in a reversed fashion in the Taiwanese context. To draw laughter, an English term without any hint of vulgar intention can be purposefully presented in the way similar to how profanity is screened on TV in order to falsely trick the audience. An example in (6) sees how the two hosts are leading the audience to falsely read an English phrase as profanity in Taiwanese.

(6) From Super Taste, November 26 2013.

1 AX 如果說

|如果說|

106 talking to the camera, which signals that the following information is targeted at the audience.

AX prefaces the piece of information with a self-initiated self-answered question 這條街叫什 麼名字 zhe tiao jie jiao cheme mingzi ‗what this street is called.‘ AX later provides the

answer by deliberately making the street name sound similar to Taiwanese profanity (line 4).

The running text @#$^% as a strategy of euphemism signals AX‘s utterance as unpresentable.

Upon hearing this, HZ stands still, with exclamation marks above him to show that he is startled. In TV programs where every single second literally counts, the prolonged pause is scripted to mean something, otherwise edited. Later, AX explains that [silαnba:] actually

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refers to the Southwest 8^th street, which can be translated as xi nan ba jie in Taiwan Mandarin (line 6). HZ then expresses his relief by letting out a long breath. The CG effects show a sign of aspiration. The short stretch of discourse is a product of complex knowledge management.

The pun is a product of managing an abundance of linguistic knowledge. The two hosts

are deploying the phonological similarity between xi nan ba in Mandarin Chinese and [silαnba:] in Taiwanese to introduce a piece of information in English. Lew (1997) suggests

that ambiguity accounts for the majority of linguistic humor. The ambiguity shows indeterminacy. The indeterminacy is however determined by HZ‘s startled reaction and the caption @#$^%. HZ‘s feigned surprise and his relief suggest that he hears something unsuitable to be aired on TV. For the performance to successfully draw humorous effects, an audience has to have the metalinguistic knowledge of how profanity is dispreferred, inadequate to screen on TV, and thus presented differently. An audience also needs to figure out how Southwest 8^th Street is related first to the Taiwanese profanity, to the literal translation in Mandarin Chinese, and to the phonological similarity between the two.

Significantly, the joke also demonstrates how the relative access of knowledge is shifting in crosslinguistic humor and how the pun is interpreted with the aids of the hosts‘ identity shifts.

It is reasonable to argue that HZ and AX have already been aware of how the joke would be unfolded. That is, both of the presenters are in a K+ position (Heritage & Raymond 2005;

Heritage 2013) where they know the place and the joke about to be disclosed. In a word, they

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both have the access and commitment to the knowledge. There is no epistemic discrepancy between them in terms of both the event knowledge and the linguistic knowledge.

Nevertheless, as the joke is unfolded, HZ positions himself as one of audience in a K- position (Heritage & Raymond 2005; Heritage 2013) who pretends to be unprepared for the profanity and to be startled. The long silence in line 5 should not be taken as HZ‘s own excerpt illustrates how fixed phrases could be laugher-inducing, presented in (7).

(7) From Super Taste, November 19, 2013

不

When HZ and AX visit Louisiana, they also meet up with the Taiwan-born baseball player, Wei-Yin Chen. When AX and HZ hit the baseball court to watch Chen play, they dress themselves as cheerleaders and address themselves as 不象 young 女孩 bu xiang young nu hai ‗girls who misbehave.‘ The term is a skillful pun. The word 象 xiang ‗elephant‘ refers to

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a baseball team in Taiwan. Young in English refers to the stereotypical image of cheerleaders being young and energetic. Phonologically young also sounds similar to 樣 yang ‗type, sort.‘

The term 象 young can also be coded as 像 樣 xiangyang to refer to stereotypical

expectations of how one should behave. In other words, xiangyoung nü hai, as a pun, can mean either cheerleaders for the Baseball Team Elephant or also well-behaved girls. By negating the phrase, the meaning ‗cheerleaders for Baseball Team Elephant‘ becomes ‗girls that misbehave.‘ No epistemic discrepancy can be observed between the two hosts. To make the point clear, they dress themselves in cheerleading miniskirts. To unfold the joke, they assume that the audience knows the relation between cheerleading and baseball games, understands Team Elephant as one of the baseball teams in Taiwan, and interprets the phonological representation of young as polysemous. Successful bilingual puns anticipate

entrenched phrases from both linguistic sources (Stefanowitsch 2002). Some might argue that 象 young could be used so frequently that it hardly requires English proficiency. Nonetheless,

only when the audience recognizes the pronunciation of young could they arrive at the reading of 像樣. In fact, 像樣 could be more entrenched than 象 young, particularly for

speakers showing no interests in baseball games. The Chinese reading of the pun probably stands out more than the English one.

The two examples also demonstrate that reading into puns is a social practice as it

requires both linguistic knowledge and social knowledge. This explains why entrenched

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expressions are manipulated. What deserves our attention is that the Chinese and Taiwanese readings of the pun are easier to process than their English readings. In addition to the presentation of these puns, the more outstanding readings in the two languages also indicate

that English is perceptually distant. A discussion related to identity will follow in the next section.