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This paper builds on a novel methodology of lexical semantics exemplified on lexical field theory by using several translations of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The present study, a large-scale collaboration, presents and compares the results for laugh, smile, grin, giggle, and other words for laughter behaviors across 14 languages and in extensive detail. The key results answer the question of what semantic dimensions the vocabularies of the various languages distinguish as marked by lexical contrasts and can inform future research in humor as well as translation studies. Based on our findings, a key marking emerges for audible (e.g., laugh) versus non-audible (e.g., smile) behaviors, as Indo-European vocabularies treat smiling as a less marked variant of laughing, e.g., German lächeln, Italian sorridere, Polish uśmiech, Turkish gülüm, but further orthogonal dimensions are documented as well, for example, aggressive, concealed, loud, or suppressed behavior. An updated hierarchy of these semantic features is proposed, and the results are presented in graphic visualizations, which also help illustrate idiosyncrasies of individual languages that go against the general trends. Exceptions to these general trends include lemmata that can cover both audible and inaudible behavior straddling what we claimed is the most important distinction (e.g., Danish grine). Finally, we outline a probabilistic method to compare word senses across languages based on aligned corpora large enough for computational approaches.

The aim of the paper is to show the Polish story of the COVID-19 pandemic as seen through a humorous looking glass. Different stages of coronavirus presence in the media and social discourse have been accompanied by the appearance and development of jokes and memes, which illustrate the rapidly changing pandemic situation. The database consists of over three hundred memes, movies, and comments collected between February and May 2020, during the pandemic humour peak, and come mainly from private WhatsApp and Facebook accounts of the researchers. The humorous material is related to introduced restrictions, changing laws, parliamentary elections, news from other affected countries as well as seasons and festive times - especially Easter - occurring in the same period of time. The universal themes present in the humorous material travelling around the world are complemented by the strictly culturally immersed topics, reflecting the specific social and political situation in Poland. The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on various kinds of mechanisms which involve intertextuality (allusions) as well as complexity of references that function as sources of humour, with special attention being paid to cultural references, for example, films, paintings, references to political life, including those of the life under socialism as well as universal themes, such as animal memes. © 2021 Eesti Keele InstituutAƒÂ‚A‚Â. All rights reserved.

The long tradition of joking connected with the first day of April seems to be dying out in the era of fake news and scary headlines published every day. The aim of the article is to show the status of April Fools’ Day jokes in the Polish and English language context on the example of the material published on a single topic — swallowing inedible objects. In order to develop the methodology of analysis of humour in the news, it is useful to take into account the notion of incongruity, whether it is appropriate incongruity, background and foreground incongruities or various levels of meta-scripts. In order to discuss the collected material, it seems necessary to specify what kind of incongruities are involved as well as analyse the style of the stories in order to identify the intended message. The irrational behaviour of the stories’ protagonists seems to point the readers in the direction of a comic reading, but the stories are accompanied by pictures and even videos which aim at proving their credibility. The analysis of the selected examples points to the presence of incongruities, which are enhanced by colloquialisms as well as quasipunch lines. Some news published on the first day of April look like jokes, but do not end with the traditional April Fool punch line, while some others are similarly strange, although they are published on different occasions. Thus it is not easy to differentiate serious from non-serious news. The appearance of daily news with incongruous content could also be seen in a broader context as one of the elements of the trend towards “weirdization” of public discourse.

The paper discusses contemporary Polish humor which features references to Chinese language and culture. Together with the ideological, political, financial and economic visibility of China, its presence in Polish humorous discourse is on the rise. Jokes, cabaret sketches and visual materials, such as memes, more and more frequently use the Chinese as targets for entertaining the audience. The article will analyze the instances of Polish humorous discourse (largely Internet memes) to show which are the most frequent specific stereotypes about the Chinese and how that relates to Davies’s models of target choice. The results suggest that Polish humor about the Chinese as an untypical case of center-periphery relations constitutes an extension of Davies’s model in that Poles see the Chinese as both comically “stupid” and “clever”. The specific comic scripts evoked by the humorous material include not only that of cheap Chinese products, incomprehensible language or proverbs and unrecognizability of the Chinese people from other Asians (all considered scripts of a periphery), but also of the huge population and high sophistication of Chinese civilization (perceived as a center). Some of our humor material, however, is better explained using Davies’s monopoly-competition model due to references to authoritarian leaders.

Indexación: Scopus. Benevolent and corrective humor are two comic styles that have been related to virtue, morality, and character strengths. A previous study also supported the viability of measuring these two styles with the BenCor in 22 countries. The present study extends the previous one by including further countries (a total of 25 countries in 29 samples with N = 7813), by testing the revised BenCor (BenCor-R), and by adding two criterion measures to assess life satisfaction and four broad humor dimensions (social fun/entertaining humor, mockery, humor ineptness, and cognitive/reflective humor). As expected, the BenCor-R showed mostly promising psychometric properties (internal consistency and factorial validity). Consistent with previous studies, benevolent humor correlated positively with life satisfaction in most countries, while corrective humor was uncorrelated with life satisfaction. These relationships were only slightly changed when controlling for social fun/entertaining humor and mockery, respectively. Benevolent humor was mostly positively associated with cognitive/reflective humor, followed by social fun/entertaining humor and mockery. Corrective humor was mostly positively associated with mockery, followed by cognitive/reflective and social fun/entertaining humor, although these relationships differed between the countries. Overall, the present study supports the viability of benevolent and corrective humor, which has yet received insufficient attention in psychology, for cross-cultural investigations and applications of humor, well-being, and morality. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V. https://link-springer-com.recursosbiblioteca.unab.cl/article/10.1007%2Fs10902-019-00185-9

The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the re-discovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin’s early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and attitudes as well as the mutual relations of verbal to visual within the meme cycles. In order to identify specific mechanisms of sophisticated humor, we attempt to identify the visual or verbal triggers of overlap of the two worlds in question, and discuss comic mechanisms of sophistication, including attributions of desire, belief and intention (purpose) to characters or the narrator as commentators on events or situations.

The present study attempts to analyze the interventions of Speakers of Polish and British Parliaments in the selected exchanges from 2018 to 2019 in terms of discourse-sensitive politeness theory advanced by Jonathan Culpeper. He proposes to use three types of impoliteness that affect three types of interlocutors’ faces via a range of impoliteness strategies. In the analyses we consider the linguistic, personal, and cultural as well as political context of the exchanges against the background of the unique, historically rooted institutional circumstances, with a special emphasis on the role of different physical contexts of respective Parliamentary chambers. We emphasize the discursive nature and continuum of (im)polite/(in)appropriate behaviors. In conclusion, the study falls back on Brown and Levinson’s tradition, argued not to be incompatible with Culpeper’s system, and confirms the existence of largely negative and largely positive politeness cultures, emphasizing the prevalence of Polish formal, impersonal, sometimes also affective impoliteness in contrast to the British somewhat more person-oriented, coercive impoliteness.

As a regular customer of restaurants both in my native Poland as in other countries (particularly in the US), I have always wondered why restaurant menus are so difficult to comprehend for a cultural outsider. In fact, this tendency is systematic and has to do with what Venuti (1995) has described as a necessary foreignization of texts in translation and what other translation scholars referred to as inherent untranslatability of certain cultural texts. Still, subjective factors, such as lack of skills or experience on the part of the translator, should not be underestimated either. The question mark in the title thus results from my initial inability to determine whether translating menus is bound to fail, at least to some degree, due to objective problems or whether an expert and experienced translator should always be able to overcome the cultural barrier and generate an acceptable translation. The article concludes by stressing the lack of appreciation of translation as a skill in Polish society as well as the international nature and diversity of Polish food tradition and its apparent class divide.

The aim of the paper is to identify the characteristic features of jokes about Polish highlanders and analyse them to isolate the comic script of a highlander. This group of jokes is treated as a good illustration of Christie Davies’s ethnic jokes theory concerning canny versus stupid and centre versus periphery oppositions, as well as mind over matter. A particular type of reasoning and the use of regional dialect are distinctive features of the joke targets that make it possible to perceive these jokes as a culturally specific phenomenon. The head shepherd (called baca) is the key character of the cycle. He is a very down-to-earth person, who is proud of his practical wisdom and has a very relaxed attitude to life—a wise fool in some jokes, thus even resembling Good Soldier Švejk in some respects. His lifestyle is usually contrasted with that of ceper—a town dweller, coming to the highlands as a tourist—treated as a kind of intruder who asks stupid questions and does not know how to appreciate life and what really matters in it. The jokes about highlanders are analysed within the paradigm of General Theory of Verbal Humour, and particularly its reasoning and reversal Logical Mechanisms. Even though Christie Davies treated the Logical Mechanism with some scepticism, claiming it is of no use in the GTVH (Davies 2004, 2011b), he would not probably mind the logic of highlanders’ utterances and behaviour being analysed. We believe he may even have enjoyed that.

This paper deals with the thorny but fascinating process of (re)constructing jokes, the dynamic process of retelling, which produces a joke structure that is often different from “canonical”. In order to study this, I have exposed a small group of native speakers of Polish and a few native speakers English of both genders to a doctor joke in the written form. Then they were asked to retell a joke they have been exposed to. The retellings were recorded, transcribed and analysed as to the joke structure (e.g. the ways of introducing the playframe, the presence of jab lines and the punch line), hearer-speaker relations, and other aspects of joke-telling. The aim of the study is to supplement Victor Raskin’s original account of joke structure with that of joke construction as outlined by him too (1985: 139-147), although regarded as marginal to his central systemic account. Moreover, joke imagery, understood in terms of image schemata, was taken into account in the analysis of the speakers’ joke performance, playing the role of humour enhancers.

Dyskusja po raz pierwszy zostala opublikowana w calości w 2006 roku w tomie Kognitywizm i komunikatywizm – dwa bieguny wspolczesnego jezykoznawstwa. Dyskusja przy okrąglym stole, pod redakcją Wladyslawa Chlopickiego, Jezyk a komunikacja 9, Krakow: Tertium.

Dyskusja miala miejsce w czasie V konferencji Tertium w dniu 13.03.2008. Po raz pierwszy zostala opublikowana w roku 2008 w tomie Jezyk a komunikacja 23 pod redakcją Wladyslawa Chlopickiego i Stanislawa Gajdy.

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This paper focuses on the contextual factors influencing the status of declarative polar (information seeking) questions in Polish. The study is based on the two tailor-made corpora of Polish student conversations, specially collected in Krakow and Krosno from 2015 to 2017, out of which 28 examples of declaratives are analysed (out of 200 identified in the corpora). Polish question research tradition, contrary to English, does not recognize the notion of a declarative question, but it does recognize the issue in other terms. Declarative questions in Polish conversation corpora are here defined as statements requesting or demanding some information from the hearer (B-events in Labov's terminology), who actually responds or reacts to them, usually cued by rising intonation (with notable exceptions of e.g. ironic declaratives), and some emotive “bias” (rhetoric, irony, humour etc.); they are analysed in the article in accordance to the cognitive linguistic methodology, involving language-thought-communication continuum, advanced by Gerard Steen, broadly applied throughout this special issue. Major conventional markers (such as a/i and ale) occurring with declaratives are identified and analysed, followed by more extended, contextual usages (referred to here, as in the whole special issue, as ‘deliberate’, following Steen's approach to metaphors). Among the markers attention is also paid to various combinations of forms, including particle sequences and question clusters, all characteristic of Polish conversational declaratives. The analysis draws attention to the functions of declaratives, including the broad repair function established in other languages, as well rhetorical usages of declaratives (esp. repetitive, emphatic or ironic), which tend to be the non-canonical A, AB or D-events, typical of Polish communication style.

The study 1 examines how metaphors are deliberately used in spoken interaction, taking into account their context and combining the analysis of conversational data with new developments in metaphor studies. In doing this, we present Estonian examples of extended metaphors co-constructed in the course of interaction. Steen's framework of deliberate metaphor theory (DMT) presents a useful paradigm to investigate the understudied area in a new way, especially in a language where deliberate metaphors have not yet been studied. In conversation, metaphorical creativity manifests itself in how metaphors are used and spontaneously adapted in the flow of talk (Cameron, 2007), often evoking humour in the process. Our second aim in the study has thus been to demonstrate how metaphor use overlaps with the use of humour in conversation. We suggest that metaphor-related words - central to the procedure of identifying deliberate metaphors (DMIP; see Steen, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015), and understood here as contextually embedded words which bring along potential ambiguity – serve either as indicators of cross-domain mapping, as triggers of humorous effects, or sometimes as both at the same time. Since we assume such deliberate use of metaphors, at least to some extent, contributes to the cultural communication style, as defined in the introduction to this issue, we draw attention to the ways Estonian speakers employ them. This is evident through the unique language-specific references, for example metaphors built on proverbs or phraseology.

Doctor jokes are one of the most popular kind of jokes because they deal with the very sensitive subject of human state of health which draws upon the very basic life-death dichotomy, listed by Raskin in his influential study (Raskin, Victor. 1985. Semantic mechanisms of humor. Dordrecht: Reidel.) among the dichotomies most common in jokes. At the same time, doctor jokes are culture-specific as they reflect the relations between doctors and patients which are typical of a culture in terms of its power distance relations, especially in institutional encounters. Such differences are emphasized by the linguistic categories, such as official and familiar forms of address or culture-specific lexical items. But the reason certain jokes do not “travel” across language boundary is often not only the language itself, but also the cultural assumptions and relations – this concerns, for instance, the references to drinking or doctors’ ineffectiveness/incompetence in Polish jokes. This study focuses on doctor jokes as a category of jokes popular both in Poland and English-speaking countries, but the broad category of doctor jokes is here restricted to those which express the doctor’s advice: this aims at specifying and comparing the jocular advice scripts, central to the doctor-patient relation in both cultures, setting them against the serious advice script.

Editorial note on the publication of academic event reports

The article first describes the old cabaret tradition of Polish comedy, and then looks at various forms of stand-up that have been spreading in Poland over the last 20 years, mainly on TV, but some originating in newly established comedy clubs. Within the last twenty years, the new form of stand-up in its American variety has been slowly moving in. The characteristics of this new genre included precisely the topics which were excluded from the old form (such as explicit sex references and scatology) as well as the focus on the vernacular. The common features of stand-up included immediacy, playing cultural and linguistic kinship with the audience, impersonations, “shifting consensus”, seeming spontaneity, and occasional self-deprecation. Young performers found a venue in the well known HBO show called “Na stojaka” (an attempt to translate stand-up into Polish, a show which ran for ten years), as well as other venues such as the stand-up competition called “Zabij mnie śmiechem” (“Kill me with laughter”) broadcast by the Polsat commercial channel since 2010, in which the winner is rewarded with a trip to an American stand-up school.This kind of stand-up does not meet with universal appeal, as one comment found on the internet clearly shows: “Stand-up Tragedy”. The Polish audiences largely believe that the performance must be first of all funny, and only then “authentic”, while some young performers seem to play mainly on obscenity and scatology and forget the need to amuse. Therefore, even though the new form has been slowly gaining ground, the cabaret prevails both in some of the forms which it shares with stand-up (e.g. non-interactive monologues, which are no longer literary but colloquial, or impersonations) and also with regard to popular performers, who largely originate in cabaret or are well-known actors.

The assessment of the fear of being laughed at in Poland: Translation and first evaluation of the Polish GELOPH The main aim of the paper was to translate and, for the first time, evaluate the Polish GELOPH. This is a 15-item questionnaire for the subjective assessment of gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at. Gelotophobia is seen as an individual differences phenomenon at a sub-clinical level. The psychometric properties of the Polish version were tested in two independently collected samples with a total N of 506 participants. The Polish GELOPH yielded good psychometric properties in terms of high reliability in both samples. The fear of being laughed at existed widely independently from the participants' age, sex, or marital status (being married or living with a partner vs. being single or not living with a partner). The Polish GELOPH can be seen as a reliable instrument for the subjective assessment of gelotophobia for research and practical applications.