Spontaneous puns: The relationship between punning and language makeup

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2018-07-06

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en

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the act of making spontaneous puns and the way a language is made up, both phonetically and prosodically. The study is partly based on a similar study on Japanese that was conducted by Otake and Cutler in 2013. An analysis was done on a corpus of spontaneous Dutch puns produced by Gerard Ekdom, a radio show host. The results of the study suggest that preservation of the source word is the most important factor in the act of punning in both Dutch and Japanese. Phonetic makeup of a language does not seem to affect the type of puns that appear in a language. The disfavoring of stress shifts between source words and target words in Dutch suggests that prosody in a language does affect the act of punning.

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Faculteit der Letteren