Language play is a key component of many children's popular graphic novels. The authors analyze the sound and word play in Dav Pilkey's illustrated Captain Underpants series. They argue that Pilkey's literary devices fall into two main areas of hyperbole and linguistic creativity and that Pilkey's language shifts the reader into a carnivalesque…

This book brings applied linguistics and translation studies together through an analysis of literary texts in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean and their translations. It examines the traces of translanguaging in translated texts with special focus on the strategic use of scripts, morphemes, words, names, onomatopoeias, metaphors, puns and…

The article deals with the analysis of the addressee's factor foregrounding in the limerick discourse. The study demonstrates that the limerick discourse is characterised by an addresser-writer's and an addressee-reader/listener's reciprocality via idiosyncratic protagonists portrayed by an addresser-writer. A limerick presents a laconic…

Linguistically speaking, the concept of humor, which seems to be vast for people, has specific dimensions by which it is generated including: puns, irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and contrastive utterances in relation to the speakers of those utterances. It is about how the extra linguistics elements dominate the situation and the delivery of humor.…

This research focuses on revealing the role of culture of education in shaping students' and teachers' attitudes to the learning process, which is largely determined by the political and social context in which it takes place. This exploration of the cultural nature of autonomy of the Ukrainian university students majoring in translation from…

Previous research has demonstrated that children with autism often have difficulty using and understanding non-literal language ("e.g.," irony, sarcasm, deception, humor, and metaphors). Irony and sarcasm may be especially difficult for children with autism because the meaning of an utterance is the opposite of what is stated. The current study…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

Oscar Wilde is one of the most hilarious playwrights in the history of English literature. And 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is his masterpiece. With Wilde's humorous and witty language as the starting point and aided by the concordancing software WORDSMITH TOOLS, a detailed analysis was carried out on this comedy from lexical level and…

In the context of texts that depicted either a minimally confrontational conversation (study 1) or a more confrontational argument (study 2) with a close friend, the use of ironic criticism was rated as being more humorous, polite, and positive, yet also as more sarcastic and mocking than direct criticism. Although our results were consistent with…

This article demonstrates, using conversation analysis, how students use address terms when reproaching the teacher. The data consist of videotaped lessons of Finnish as a second language in secondary school. The analyses show, first of all, that teacher-oriented address terms can be used separately as reproaches, in which case they are marked…

Ambiguity can be enjoyed in statements without context, in unclear comparisons, in words often confused, and in casual disorders. In spite of the grammarians' efforts to "disambiguate," it is doubtful that any willful act or combination of acts can eliminate ambiguity, since language is a system of symbols which can stand for one thing or another.…

While it is fashionable to use the semantic pun in advertising (for example, the meaning extension in "dollars and sense"), a lot of this humor slips past the American reader; not only unintentional bloopers that get past the proofreader but also intentional puns that escape the audience. Advertising humor has other pitfalls as well--the…

In this era of rapid globalization of business opportunities, many managers face the need to communicate with foreign counterparts who do not speak English. The solution, in many cases, is to use an interpreter. Interpreters, however, may make mistakes, and irritation, embarrassment and even major problems may arise from errors in translation.…

Discusses the failure of Joe Bob Briggs' parody of "We Are the World" in terms of the development of the communal sense that creates a set of group norms, which in turn create "phantom constraints" of which the parody's author may not be aware.(NKA)