| dc.description.abstract | Among the most characteristic features of young people's speech is that of
word play, called punning or paronomasia in the English linguistic literature. The
effect of this phenomenon is achieved on the basis of different types of associations
– internal or “in-group” associations (understandable only to the closed
social group, a kind of youth argot) and external or “out-group”, which can be
guessed by almost every speaker. The intended result of the punning in youth
slang is to achieve a humorous effect. A thing is considered funny when something
else, already well known, is (re)presented in a somewhat absurd aspect, a
basic rule in comedy – reduction ad absurdum. The studied puns are also a result
of the combination of two opposite “scenarios” or models. In the Balkan cultural
context, such scenarios are very colorful and popular in slang word formation and
are based on the imitation of foreign languages, the imitation of а foreign accent
and mistakes, as well as the imitation of Turkish vocabulary (the last one is registered
in both Greek and Bulgarian, and is part of a bigger process which I refer to
as balkanization of the slang). Punning also is based on funny abbreviations,
phonetic and morphologic changes via minimal deformation which aims at the
effect of surprise. An example of the balkanization of the youth slang by punning
is the so-called imitation of Turkish vocabulary – exactly the same process that
we observe in the Bulgarian and Greek youth slang, as in the invented, imaginary
words, which are similar to actual Turkish words. | en_US |
