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A Cognitive Model for Bilingual Puns Sebastian Knospe A Cognitive Model for Bilingual Puns Abstract: Puns form a highly creative type of wordplay which can be encoun- tered in both oral and written discourse, e.g. in literary works and the press, but also in everyday language. Although they are traditionally less esteemed in Germany than in France, Britain and the US, Görlach (2003: 30) observes a growing inclination to use them in a German context if they have a bilingual shape, i.e. amalgamate German and English material. This notwithstanding, the number of studies devoted to this phenomenon is rather limited so far. Building on press examples of German / English puns, this paper seeks to show that their particular communicative attractiveness can be accounted for by considering their linguistic make-up and the way in which they are cognitively processed in light of the contexts in which they are used. It is argued that they are special in that they result from a structural blending of material from two linguistic codes (here: German and English), while also representing blends from a cognitive and conceptual point of view like many other linguistic phenomena such as metaphors and metonymies. Acknowledging the present status of English in Germany, it is shown what cognitive investments readers have to make to get behind the meaning of bilingual puns and what discursive effects may unfold when they are implemented in journalistic texts. Keywords: Anglicism, blended space bilingual pun, code blending, code blend, conceptual blending, conceptual blend, diamorph, English, generic space, German, homonymy, input space, polysemy * 1 Introduction Although puns represent a ludic device documented in different linguistic cul- tures, as is shown by Attardo (1994), it is especially in examples from English and French that this type of wordplay stands out (see Redfern 1984: 160). Not only is it found in the literature of different periods, for instance in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare (Delabastita 1993), Lewis Carroll (see, e.g., Zirker 2010; Kullmann, this volume), and Vladimir Nabokov, to present a || * I would like to thank the editors of this volume and the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments. DOI 10.1515/9783110406719-008, © 2018 Sebastian Knospe, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 162 | Sebastian Knospe brief selection of writers, but also in the diction of newspapers (cf., e.g., Alex- ander 1997: 93–99), including printed ads (see Tanaka 1992, 1999). Moreover, puns may appear in everyday life humor, e.g. in jocular verbal combats known as “ping-pong punning,” in which the participants try to outplay each other by initiating clever linguistic moves (cf., e.g., Chiaro 1992: 17; Alexander 1997: 73– 92; Crystal 1998: 1-5; Blake 2007: 68–80). Distributed across different domains of oral and written use and harboring humorous potential (Alexander 1997: 128), puns, without having been made a central topic of research (see Attardo 1994: 108, 141–142), have thus caught the attention of scholars from various disciplines. These include the fields of stylistics, humor and translation studies, as well as social psychology and philosophy (see Attardo 1994: 14–59). Research typically focuses on puns that operate within one language. Wit- ness the following monolingual examples that are similar to each other in that they share a comic function, but differ in terms of the punning mechanisms used (see also Section 3): (1) What is grey, has four legs, a long tail and a trunk? – A mouse going on holiday. (Alexan- der 1997: 52) (2) Only kings worry about a receding heir line. In example (1), the joke-teller confronts the hearer with a seemingly straight- forward question. While the first three traits adduced in the opening line (grey color, long tail, four legs) all seem to point towards a mouse or rat, the fourth feature named, i.e. the word trunk, leads the hearer towards a different interpre- tation, creating the assumption that an elephant is described here. However, this impression is cancelled again by the resolution, which creates an amusing effect because it turns out that the initial interpretation was indeed the correct one. To create this effect, the narrator exploits the different meanings of English trunk that may refer to different entities: amongst other things, an elephant’s nose or a solid piece of luggage. In (2), the joke-teller deploys a different punning mechanism by playing with the English nouns heir [ɛə(r)] and hair [hɛə(r)]. Importantly, only one of the two nouns is materialized in the written code; yet, the second unit is cognitively activated by competent recipients as well. Its evocation is supported by three factors: firstly, hair and heir are almost identically pronounced, at least in rapid speech, secondly, the compounds hair line and heir line (or lineage) can both be considered as institutionalized English items. Thirdly, the adjective receding creates a particular semantic context that lets one expect hair rather than heir. As a result, most hearers or readers are likely to establish a connection between A Cognitive Model for Bilingual Puns | 163 the word heir, which appears on the level of linguistic expression in the written version, and the word hair. All this serves as the structural anchor for a joke which addresses thoughts that are said to occupy only a king’s mind. In fact, the statement made in (2) is ambiguous in that it can be read in two ways: On one level, we may take it as indicative of the monarch’s fear to gradu- ally lose his hair – a fate a person of this social status might be more concerned with than other men who stand much less in the limelight. On another level, however, the one-liner alludes to the consequences that a ruler may be afraid of when he remains without offspring. This implies a complex connection between alopecia, infertility, and the end of his dynasty. In this interpretation, heir is treated as an English element, although, unlike the noun hair, the word has no Germanic origin (OED 2014: “hair” n.), but was borrowed from French (h)eir in Middle English (OED 2014: “heir” n.), similar to trunk which goes back to French tronc (OED 2014: “trunk” n.). What is decisive in this respect is not the etymology of the words, but the fact that both heir and trunk have been completely anglicized, i.e. adopted an English form. From this point of view, the wordplay initiated in examples (1) and (2) is monolingual in nature because the loanword status of one of the two elements at play is not transparent any longer. In contrast to that, there are cases in which puns are based on an “interlinguistic” (Crystal 2008: 135) or bilingual play (Stefan- owitsch 2002) with material that can be synchronically attributed to two differ- ent languages in contact with each other (see Bauer, this volume, who studies secret wordplay, which partly includes bilingual punning). It is this category of puns that will be at the heart of this article. As already suggested, the interpreta- tion of these puns as “bilingual” is grounded in a synchronic, formally based criterion, i.e. even loanwords well-established in use are treated as foreign as long as their pronunciation, spelling and / or morphology have not or only part- ly been nativized (see Görlach 2003: 1; Onysko 2007: 62–94; Knospe 2014: 51– 81). Accordingly, in contrast to example (2), the wording in (3) can be classified as bilingual: (3) Cool-tur (Stefanowitsch 2002: 69) Morphologically, this expression blends the German noun Kultur [kʊlˈtʊɐ] ‘cul- ture’ and the formally unintegrated Anglicism cool [ku:l], which appears in the first syllable of the coinage, but, unlike the German noun, contains a long [u:]. In line with the structural amalgamation accomplished, the form blends two meanings, showing the attempt of the coiners to work against the prejudice that culture means boredom. Instead, they promise “cool” cultural attractions that 164 | Sebastian Knospe are also interesting for young people. The configuration in example (3) was used in an advertising campaign run in several German cities. While there is a persuasive component contained in (3), the main function of (4) seems to be ludic (cf. examples (1) and (2)). In the joke unfolding, the narrator, a German radio announcer, wonders why there is rarely snow in Lon- don in the winter: (4) Warum haben die in London eigentlich keinen Schnee? Weil sie den Tower haben. [Why do they actually have no snow in London? Because they have the [taʊɐ].] (Koll-Stobbe 2000: 116) The punchline in (4) wittily takes advantage of the homophony of the nativized form of the English proper name Tower [taʊə(r)], which is likely to be realized as [taʊɐ] by most German speakers similar to the pronunciation found in British English, and the German ad hoc creation Tauer [taʊɐ]. In the given situation, the latter term can be interpreted as a nonce equivalent to the more complex technical term Taugerät ‘thawing system, defroster,’ since it is analyzable as a derivation which consists of the morphological root tau ‘to melt’ and the agen- tive suffix -er. Hence, the phonic realization of the element Tower is reinterpret- ed in a different sense denoting an object that is capable of melting away ice and snow (see Koll-Stobbe 2000: 35). Structurally, it is the well-known unit Tower which is activated first, but via homonymic links, i.e. due to the identical pronunciation of the forms, recipients, in light of the context provided, are able to identify the German ad hoc form, viz. Tauer. According to Stefanowitsch (2002: 67–68), puns like (3) and (4) which jug- gle with German material and items adopted from the English language have become ubiquitous, especially in written German discourse.
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