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Abstract: The article analyzes the speech of artificial bilinguals who use the method of play on words (punning) while speaking a foreign language and who tend to create dialogues of a metalingual nature around wordplay language units. It is emphasized that the creator of the pun deliberately uses in speech – as a ‘social glue’– wordplay neologisms that attract the attention of the addressees of the pun, and ensure their playful involvement in such wordplay dialogues. The purpose of this article is to analyze metalingual utterances of the addressees of wordplay in the dialogues of artificial bilinguals based on non-conventional linguistic units. The novelty of the current study lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the investigation of wordplay in this case is carried out on the unusual, insufficiently studied material of the speech of bilinguals in a foreign language, and, on the other hand, that the article is devoted to the analysis of verbal responses of the addressees of the wordplay, although traditionally, the speech strategies of the wordplay creators are most often studied in linguistic literature. The author of the study introduces the term ‘normeme’ as a conventional language unit, which turns out to be a trigger for the creation of wordplay, and the term ‘puneme’ as a non-conventional language unit, which is the result of deviation from the normeme. It is also noted that, usually, one of the elements of a normeme associatively evokes in the bilingual’s mind some metatexts consisting of subsets of elements (phonemes, morphemes or lexemes), which leads to the creation of punemes, and the bilingual dialogue around such non-conventional language units reflects the part of this metatextual subset, which is commonly accompanied by metalingual utterances of the dialogue participants. It is emphasized that the metalingual utterances of the addressee of the wordplay are associated with the formulation of feedback with the wordplay creator and are initiated by the special features of the punemes that produce ‘sound and semantic pressure’ on the addressee. The study presents a systematization of the addressee's metalingual utterances in response to the introduction of the punemes from the point of view of their linguistic and communicative reflections in relation to the creator’s motivational effort.

About the author(s) :

Marina O. Kunshchikova

Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin 

(Ekaterinburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0499-9312

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 04.10.2021; date of publication: 30.03.2022

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