Linguistic and Stylistic Features of Humorous Discourse Based on

Jokes in English

Mukhabbat Salayeva

, Gavkhar Eshchanova

and Mukhayyo Atadjanova

Urgench State University, Urgench, Uzbekistan

Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature named after Alisher Navoi. Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Keywords. Discourse, Humorous Discourse, Joke, Linguistic and Stylistic Form, Anecdote.

Abstract. The article examines the linguistic and stylistic features of the humorous discourse based on jokes in English

and identifies the distinctive features of the discourse, which are attributed to playful personal and everyday

discourse. Morphological features are also numerous, among which the use of a large number of phrasal verbs

stands out, which makes the text of the joke more colloquial; the use of neologisms is also noted in order to

impress the interlocutor with an unusual, contrary to all norms word-the denouement of the joke. The method

of statistical analysis of syntactic means revealed that simple sentences predominate in jokes.

1 INTRODUCTION

In the general sense, discourse (fr. discours) is

speech, the process of linguistic activity. Discourse is

a multi-valued concept.

In the history of classical philosophy, it was used to

characterize the sequential transition from one

discrete step to another, and the deployment of

thinking expressed in concepts and judgments, as

opposed to the intuitive grasp of the whole to its parts.

In the modern French philosophy of postmodernism,

it is a characteristic of a special mentality and

ideology, which are expressed in a text that has

coherence and integrity and is immersed in life, socio-

cultural, socio-psychological, and other contexts.

The first studies of the internal organization of

discourse date back to the border of the 50s of the 20

century, when works appeared entirely focused on

constructions consisting of more than one sentence -

"complex syntactic whole" and "super–phrasal units".

In Russian linguistics, the logical-grammatical

relations between related statements forming a super-

phrasal unity in speech have been studied mainly

(Figurovsky, 1974:109). The term "complex syntactic

whole" was used by L.V. Shcherba was already in the

1920s in relation to a single complex utterance

combining various types of syntactic connection of

components (composition, subordination, isolation,

Corresponding author

introductory constructions, etc.): (Shcherba,

1974:97). By the end of the 80s of the twentieth

century, discourse began to be understood as a

complex communicative phenomenon, a complex

system of knowledge hierarchy, including, in addition

to the text, also extralinguistic factors (knowledge

about the world, opinions, attitudes, goals of the

addressee, etc.) necessary for understanding the text.

In addition, there are also other traditions of

understanding discourse, in particular, the tradition

coming from M. Foucault, associated with the

inclusion of power relations and ideology in the

context of considering discourse, in the field of which

discourse acquires a particular social meaning. In this

case, discourse is often understood as "the general

idea that language is structured according to patterns

that determine the statements of people in various

spheres of social life. Well—known examples are

"medical discourse" or "political discourse".

There is no clear and generally accepted definition

of "discourse", however, it should be noted this term

has gained wide popularity in recent years.

The interdisciplinary field of study and the

corresponding branch of linguistics that studies

discourse are both referred to as discourse analysis or

discourse studies. Although language interaction has

been the subject of such disciplines as rhetoric and

oratory for centuries, and later followed by stylistics

and literary studies, discursive analysis has only been

Salayeva, M., Eshchanova, G. and Atadjanova, M.

Linguistic and Stylistic Features of Humorous Discourse Based on Jokes in English.

DOI: 10.5220/0012483900003792

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st Pamir Transboundary Conference for Sustainable Societies (PAMIR 2023), pages 249-252

ISBN: 978-989-758-687-3

249

formed as a scientific direction in recent decades.

This happened against the background of the

prevailing linguistics for most of the 20th century. F.

de Saussure believed that the true object of linguistics

is the language system (as opposed to speech), and

N.Chomsky urged linguists to study linguistic

"competence" and abstract from the issues of

language use. Recently, however, cognitive attitudes

in the science of language are beginning to change

and the opinion is gaining strength, according to

which no linguistic phenomena can be adequately

understood and described outside of their use, without

taking into account their discursive aspects.

Therefore, discursive analysis becomes one of the

central sections of linguistics.

Thus, based on the definitions considered, it can be

concluded that in modern linguistics, the text is

understood as an abstract, formal construction, and

discourse is understood as various types of its

actualization, considered from the point of view of

mental processes in connection with extralinguistic

factors.

Humorous discourse is characterized by a special

laughing attitude to the reality, which is expressed in

combination in the action or thought of the object of

influence with a field of possibilities that are

fundamentally not inherent in it (A.V. Nechaev).

Understanding depends on the perception of this

combination and on the assessment of the subjective

position expressed by this ridiculous attitude. Humor

allows you to reduce social distance, is a means of

group identification. The distinguishing function of

humor function allows you to set the boundary

between "us" and "them". It is carried out through the

appeal of communicating participants to common

values. Humor reflects cultural values and, by

promoting intra-group cohesion, is itself a cultural

value. A special case of intra-group identification

through humor is national humor, by which we mean

humor, understandable and shared by most

representatives of this culture. The linguistic and

cultural features of humor are reflected in the works

of M.M. Bakhtin, V.I.Zelvis, V.I.Karasik, T.Cohen,

M.A.Kulinich, O.A.Leontovich, D.S.Likhachev,

V.Heller.

Understanding humor depends on three factors: the

communication situation, the sender, and the

recipient of the message. The sender and recipient of

the message are complex variables, the value of

which is determined by many factors, including their

participation in the creation of the communication

situation itself. The result of a humorous act is a

change in the participants' level of understanding of

the situation.

The laughing attitude that the sender of the message

demonstrates and the recipient shares, perceiving this

laughing attitude and evaluating the subjective

position of the sender of the message, requires

awareness by all participants in communication,

therefore the subject of the relationship signals this.

A laughing attitude implies the presence of a kind of

error, while the recipient of the message must

understand that it is "deliberately said so", otherwise

he can evaluate the corresponding expression simply

as an inaccuracy or inaccuracy, and a communicative

failure will occur. Therefore, the use of a laughing

attitude is signaled by special markers.

- the communicative intention of the communication

participants to get away from a serious conversation;

-the humorous tone of communication, i.e., the desire

to shorten the distance and critically rethink current

concepts in a mild form;

-the presence of certain models of humorous behavior

accepted in this linguoculture.

Anecdote (in English, it corresponds to the variant

“joke”) - fr. anecdote — a tale, a tall tale; from Greek.

“τὸ ἀνέκδοτoν” - unpublished, lit. "unpublished"(

Karasik V.I. (1997))) is a short funny story, usually

of a narrative nature, that is, passed from mouth to

mouth.

V.I. Karasik considers an anecdote as a stable form

of narration characterized by features that distinguish

this type of text from related types. At its core, this

speech genre refers to conversational communication,

which is characterized by combining the situation-

topic with the situation of current communication

(Karasik:1997). In other words, an anecdote is

characterized by a combination of the current real

situation of communication and a fictional one. At the

same time, the sender and recipient of the message

identify certain points of contact between the real

current situation/discourse and the fictional situation

in the joke. This creates a special intertext – a

current/fictional discourse.

2 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Most often, an anecdote is characterized by an

unexpected semantic resolution at the very end,

which gives rise to laughter. It can be a play on words,

or modern associations that require additional

knowledge: social, literary, historical, geographical,

etc. Jokes cover almost all spheres of human activity.

In most cases, the authors of the jokes are unknown.

The texts of jokes usually consist of two parts: the

beginning (introduction) , which introduces the

listener to the content plan, informs the topic, creates

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intrigue, and a certaintension of expectation; and the

end (denouement). The denouement of an anecdote,

regardless of the length of the whole text, should

always be brief, unexpected, and often paradoxical,

which usually makes the anecdote funny.

Jokes can be categorised into various themes, such

as politics, gender dynamics, celebrities, music,

literature, education, religion, military, cultural

differences, and more.

According to the structure, English jokes can be

conditionally divided into:

dialogue-based jokes. Such anecdotes are mostly

constructed from several replicas without remarks.

short jokes. These are various anecdotes.

pun jokes (jokes based on wordplay)

3 METHODS

The texts of jokes are characterized by a number of

lexical features. The main part of the texts of jokes is

represented by common vocabulary (office,

cucumber, doctor, English teacher, wife, minute),

which, however, is influenced by the specifics of the

type of text. Thus, the belonging of an anecdote to the

narrative genre explains the presence of colloquial

vocabulary and constructions in the texts

The belonging of the joke to the colloquial genre and

its widespread use by all ages and social groups

explains the presence of slang in the texts: peace out,

homey, bloke.

English jokes in most cases are based on ambiguity

and wordplay (puns), which is the greatest difficulty

for the translator. For example: Hey, man! Please call

me a taxi. Another vivid example of wordplay:

DINER: Waiter! Will my hamburger be long?

WAITER: No. It will be round and flat, sir. The comic

nature of the situation lies in the fact that each of the

readers interprets the word in his own way.

And finally, in many texts of jokes, there is such a

phenomenon as speaking surnames. As a rule, the

heroes of the joke are endowed with names that allow

you to build a comic situation on the play of words,

for example:

In this case, the whole comic anecdote is based on

the name of the hero. Quite a logical answer of the

hero to the question "Could you tell me your name?"

(Will you tell me your name?) it is the cause of comic

misunderstanding and conflict between the characters

of the joke, which causes laughter from the listener of

the joke. The second name, in turn, is involved in a

play on words: "Will Knot" is perceived by the hero

as a refusal to give his name, which contributes to the

comicality of the situation. Such lexical features are

inherent in the texts of jokes.

A significant part of the texts of jokes is simple

sentences. (Now that’s quite a coincidence) This is

explained by the narrative nature of anecdotes: the

presence of simple syntactic constructions is

characteristic of colloquial texts. However, since in

this work we are dealing with written versions of

anecdotes, there are also complex sentences. In

complex sentences, I would like to highlight complex

sentences with direct speech. The inclusion of

character replicas in the texts of jokes gives the

listener the opportunity to imagine the situation. For

example: «Haven’t I been telling you for the last

hour that I’ll be ready in a minute? »

This sentence exhibits a complex structure with

various types of subordination. It consists of two

simple sentences: " Have I notbeen telling you for the

last hour" and "that I will be ready in a minute?" Of

which the first and second are connected by a

subordinate bond using the union that; the second

sentence is a secondary, two-part circumstantial

subordinate of the cause (I –subject, expressed by the

pronoun will be ready – predicate, expressed by the

verb), the first - the main sentence is two–part (I –

subject, expressed by the pronoun, been telling-

predicate, expressed by the verb). I would also like to

note the high occurrence of interrogative sentences in

the texts. Their frequency is due to the fact that many

anecdotes have a question-and-answer structure,

which contributes to a more effective establishment

of contact with the interlocutor: the narrator asks the

interlocutor a "tricky question", which the

interlocutor tries to answer using all his wit, and then

the narrator says the correct answer, which most often

strikes with its surprise and illogicality, creating thus

the comic effect. For example:

What is the longest word in the English language?

»Smiles».

In this case, the first remark, which is an

interrogative sentence, will invariably make the

interlocutor think about trying to come up with his

answer, The more unexpected the correct answer

sounds for the interlocutor, which is a transcript of

this answer. Because there is a mile between its first

and last letters!

The following example resembles a Russian joke

with the phrase "You can't execute pardon" - because

the meaning in it changes depending on where to

make a logical pause:

An English teacher wrote these words on the

whiteboard: "woman without her man is nothing".

The teacher then asked the students to punctuate the

words correctly. The men wrote: "Woman, without

Linguistic and Stylistic Features of Humorous Discourse Based on Jokes in English

251

her man, is nothing." The women wrote: "Woman!

Without her, man is nothing."

This example also vividly illustrates the difference

between male and female logic: everyone placed a

logical emphasis in such a way that a representative

of their gender was in a winning position (men wrote:

"A woman, without her man, is nothing; women: A

woman! A man is nothing without her!).

These are the main syntactic features inherent in the

texts of jokes.

Let's consider the most characteristic

morphological techniques inherent in the texts of

jokes.

One of which is the use of a large number of phrasal

verbs, which is explained by the focus of jokes on oral

speech phrasal verbs: to spank, to stand up and yell.

4 CONCLUSION

Based on the above, the analysis of English -

language anecdotes revealed the following:

-lexical features of anecdotes are characterized by

commonly used words, proper names, and words with

emotional and evaluative vocabulary.

-as the most striking lexical features of anecdotes, one

can single out wordplay.

Having considered the concept of discourse, we

concluded that discourse is more focused on studying

the dynamic nature of the object being studied and

includes, in addition to the text, such extralinguistic

factors as the addressee's life experience and

knowledge, the relationship of communicants, the

conditions in which communication takes place.

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