Puns and word-play

Punning repetition. In the puns two or more senses are actually suggested by a single occurrence of the ambiguous sequence of sounds. But a double meaning can also be brought to one's attention by a repetition of the same sequence, first in one sense and then in another.

Ex. That lie shall lie so heavy on my sword… (Sh., Richard II)

Play on antonyms. One way to make a multiple meaning spring to notice is to use two words which are normally antonyms in non-antonymous senses.

Ex.

therefore pardon me

And not impute this yielding to to light love

Which the dark night hath so discovered (Sh., Romeo and Juliet)

The 'asyntactic' pun. In an 'asyntactic' pun, one of the meanings does not actually fit into the syntactic context.

Ex. Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find a grave man. (Sh., Romeo and Juliet)

The etymological pun. Puns which bring together an etymological meaning and a current meaning of the same word. Folk etymology.

Ex. Championship, nightmare.

ZEUGMA (Syllepsis). The rhetorical figure of ZEUGMA (SYLLEPSIS = 'taking together') can be seen as a type of pun. It is a compound structure in which two superficially alike constructions are collapsed together, so that one item is understood in disparate senses. It’s a lexico-syntactic means which includes a verb and two or more objects to it so that figurative and direct meanings clash together simultaneously.

Ex. The rich arrived in pairs and in Rolls-Royces.

Play on similarity of pronunciation – Paronymic attraction. A 'jingle' depending on approximate rather than absolute homonymity. This kind of repetition differs only in the degree of similarity from that called 'chiming' or alliteration. The likeness of sound leads one to look out for a connection in sense as well. Paronymic attraction may take the form of malapropism – misuse of words on the grounds of their sound resemblance.

Ex. Pets? Pests?

‘Oh where are you going ,’said reader to rider,

‘The valley is fatal with furnaces burn,

Yonder’s the midden whose odours will madden,

That gap is the grave where’s mortal return.’ (Auden)

Another kind of paronymic attraction is illustrated in the bizarre word-blends and neologisms (such as of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake), e.g. museyroom, wholeborrow, Gracehoper. In these cases the immediate warranty can be divided into two parts. The first is the apprehension of a linguistic connection - actually a phonological resemblance - between the invented word and one or more well-established items of vocabulary: museum, wheelbarrow, grasshopper. The second is the attempt to match this linguistic connection with some connection outside language, perhaps some referential connection between the invented words and the 'proper' words we map on to them. Thus museyroom suggests, appropriately enough, that a museum is a room in which one muses.

A pun is a foregrounded lexical ambiguity, which may have its origin either in homonymy or polysemy. Generally speaking, the more blatant and contrived variety of pun is homonymic.

The type of pun which expresses two meanings through the same occurrence is, we might say, its own justification, for it gives two meanings for the price of one, and so adds to the text’s density and richness of significance. to justify a pun or play on words, we look for a significant connection, either of similarity or of contrast, between the meanings. In a polysemantic pun, such a connection is almost bound to offer itself, for the relationship between different senses of the same item is usually such that a derivation from one to the other can be traced by metaphor, or some other rule of transference. With the homonymic pun, in contrast, less emphasis is on the semantic connection than on the ingenuity of the writer in taking advantage of an arbitrary identity of sound.

OXYMORON is a trope, joining two contrastive in meaning, incompatible words (usually containing antonymous ideas), revealing inner contradiction of the object or situation described. Breach of lexical combinability in the case of oxymoron is caused not by the absence of the semantic co-ordination, but by contrast, opposition. The most typical oxymoron consists of an attributive (a nice scoundrel) or adverbial (shouted silently) word-combination, less frequently it is based on other principles (doomed to liberty)

BATHOS (anticlimax) - a semantically false chain. Structurally presented as a chain of homogeneous members heterogeneous in meaning, bathos calls forth an acute feeling of incongruity, half-linguistic, half-logical.

UNEXPECTED COLLOCATIONS. The notion of unexpected collocation is broader than the notion of a trope. The complex study of unexpected collocations on different levels allows to see and show the common in what was considered earlier different stylistic phenomena.

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