Imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay in the sitcom Modern Family: A relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatic approach

Abstract

The paper analyses imperfect homophony as a source of wordplay, with a view to delineating the way two concepts or only one concept is valid for the discourse. Second, it investigates the source of the contextual information required for the identification of the target expression. The analysis is performed in the light of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory. It will be demonstrated that the target concept is accessed via activating a search for relevance triggered by the phonetic similarity between two concepts as well as the linguistic context. The findings of a study will demonstrate that puns stemming from imperfect homophony can be divided into those in which two concepts are facilitated and juxtaposed in linguistic context and thus their encyclopaedic entries are fully valid for the overall humorous interpretation and those in which only one novel concept is valid for the ongoing conversation. In addition, the puns under analysis can be categorised according to the criterion of the source of contextual information required for the identification of the target expression. In the paper, the key role of context will be discussed and specified, with the emphasis on the viewer’s perspective. The theoretical proposals are illustrated with imperfect homophony-based puns derived from the sitcom Modern Family.