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This thesis intends to demonstrate that the idea of the end is a crucial motive of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It analyses the verbal and formal means by which Hill attempts to have his poems arrive at ends. The ends are, chiefly, the reconciliation of antagonists in word or thought; and the perfect articulation of the poem. The acknowledgement of failure to achieve such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. The thesis examines in detail Hill’s puns, word-games, rhymes, syntaxes, and genres — their local reconciliations and entrenched contrarieties — and claims for them a significant place in the study of Hill’s poetry, particularly with regard to its sustained concern with ends and endings. Little has been written to date about Hill’s entire poetic corpus as represented in Broken Hierarchies (2013), due to the recentness of the work. This thesis draws from the earliest to the latest of Hill’s poetic writings; and makes extensive use of archival material. It steps beyond the ‘historical drama’ of language depicted in Matthew Sperling’s Visionary Philology (2014) and Alex Pestell’s Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason (2016) and asserts that the drama in Hill’s poetry, seeking to transcend history, is constantly related to its end: not only its termination in time but its consummating purpose.

The word pun is one of the figures of speech that people employ in everyday communication and especially in literary works in order to advance intricate aspects of meaning that may not be easy to express using 'plain' language. The word pun generally provides a speaker with an opportunity to mean more while saying less instead of saying more while meaning less. Considering the facts that people primarily communicate in order to exchange meaning, and that meaning can be very elusive and controversial, there are two questions about the use of the word pun. Can people understand the meaning in word puns? And, if they can, how do they do so? These questions are especially relevant in the case of literary works because the author is far removed from the audience. As such, there is no room for the negotiation of meaning. The current study probes these two questions by considering two types of word pun, Chiasmus and Metathesis, which are composed through the transposition of the morphological and or syntactic order of expressions. At a theoretical level, the study explores and explains the common underlying processes that guide the comprehension of the word puns. Further than that, it demonstrates through a case study that people are able to understand the word puns by using what the study proposes to be the reverse principle. Ultimately, the study illustrates how people derive meaning of utterances through interplay of the different subsystems of the language system. The word puns in this study present a good context in which to explore interfaces between semantics and other language fields by linking insights drawn from different fields of linguistic enquiry to the concept of meaning and demonstrating how aspects of all these come together in explaining the processing of word puns that involve morphological and syntactic transposition. Additionally, the study demonstrates that people understand the world by relating concepts to one another because of the underlying relationships existing between concepts and by virtue of the relationships that hold between and among words or word parts. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007.

This study aims to investigate to what extent Swedish upper secondary school learners of L2 English understand the meanings of polysemous words and whether puns can be used to teach such words. A test and two questionnaires were constructed to retrieve data from both students and teachers. The results of the study show that Swedish upper secondary school learners of L2 English generally have an acceptable knowledge of polysemous words, but depending on the type of program the students are attending, their understanding differs. Based on these results, it was also concluded that puns can be used in education to teach students about the meanings of polysemous words. The results from the questionnaires display that students in general have a positive attitude towards using puns in the classroom and that they found them entertaining and humorous. In addition, the students also saw this approach as beneficial to their retention and motivation. Lastly, the teachers expressed that using humor can strengthen the learning process, and if the students find the teaching situation enjoyable, they learn faster and it can increase their retention.

This study investigates the use of different strategies for translating puns in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The material chosen for this study consist of the two Swedish translations by Nonnen (1870/1984) and Westman (2009). Six puns were selected for the analysis which greatly relies on Delabastita’s (1996) eight strategies for translating puns, and Newmark’s (1988) translation methods. The analysis shows that Westman empathises with the readers of the TT while Nonnen empathises with the ST. This entails that Westman tends to use a more ‘free’ translation and is more inclined to adapt the ST puns to make them more visible for the readership of the TT. The priority for Nonnen, on the other hand, is to remain faithful to the contextual meaning of the ST. Paradoxically, to be faithful to the ST does not necessarily entail that the translator respects the semantic aspects of the ST, but that they adapt the culture of the ST to better fit the cultural and linguistic framework of the TL. Since Westman adapts the ST puns so that they are still recognised by the reader of the TT, her translation appears to be more suitable for the TL readership than Nonnen’s.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Frank B. Brooks, Florida State University, College of Education, Dept. of Middle and Secondary Education. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 23, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Cette thèse démontre le caractère fondamental du multilinguisme de Nabokov dans son écriture en anglais : après avoir été un auteur prolifique en russe, l’écrivain a opéré une transition linguistique et n’a plus composé ses romans qu’en langue anglaise. Cette dernière ne peut nullement être réduite à une langue seconde puisque Nabokov a su l’écrire avant le russe et la parlait depuis l’enfance. Il a par ailleurs bénéficié d’une éducation polyglotte puisqu’il maîtrisait parfaitement le français. Cette thèse étudie le style de Nabokov en soulignant sa créativité linguistique et en examinant le rôle fondateur que la traduction a joué dans le positionnement de ses différentes langues les unes par rapport aux autres. L’identité bilingue de Nabokov a pour conséquence que son écriture est déviante, mais aussi défiante : elle est marquée d’étrangeté (le caractère de ce qui est étrange) et d’étrangéité (ce qui est étranger). Dans ses romans, la langue anglaise voit surgir en son sein des mots étrangers qui, typographiquement et sémantiquement, déstabilisent la lecture : le phénomène de l’alternance codique (ou code-switching) est au cœur de cette thèse et interroge le rapport entre l’auteur tyrannique (Couturier) et son lecteur. La langue anglaise elle-même perd de sa familiarité et devient étrangère : le bilinguisme de Nabokov lui confère un statut d’étranger dans la langue, ce qui lui permet de voir la violence du langage (Lecercle) et de la faire apparaître, notamment grâce à des calembours et des néologismes. Nabokov est ce que Deleuze appelle un grand écrivain à l’aide d’une formule proustienne : ses livres « sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère ». / This thesis shows how central Nabokov’s multilingualism was to his prose in English: after authoring several works in Russian, the writer changed languages and then only wrote his novels in English. It was not merely a second language for him because Nabokov could write English before Russian and he had spoken it since childhood. Besides, he enjoyed a polyglot education and was fluent in French. This thesis studies Nabokov’s style in English by focusing on his linguistic creativity and by examining the founding role that translation played in how his several tongues were going to position themselves in relation to one another. Nabokov’s bilingual identity means that his writing both challenges and deviates from the norm: it is dappled with strangeness and foreignness. In his novels, foreign words irrupt in the midst of the English prose and, typographically and semantically, they destabilize the reading experience: code-switching is at the heart of this thesis and questions the relation between “the narrator’s tyranny” (Couturier) and his reader. English itself loses its familiarity and becomes a foreign language: Nabokov’s bilingualism means he is like a foreigner in this tongue; therefore he reveals the violence of language (Lecercle) and puts it into play through puns and neologisms. Nabokov is what Deleuze calls, thanks to a Proustian expression, a great writer: his books “are written in a kind of foreign language”.

ABSTRACT: Puns are short humorous texts that play on structural ambiguity in order to create incongruous scripts. The perception of their humour requires considerable pragmatic manipulation, which may present problems for L2 learners, which is why many scholars agree that they are best reserved for more advanced students. Using a combination of Quantitative and Qualitative analysis of data yielded from a survey containing puns and referential jokes, this study confirms that humour through puns is largely inaccessible to Swedish High School learners of English, with ambiguity being the main obstacle across the test groups. However, since language play has been proven to be facilitative to language learning, and since students themselves express a wish to be able to participate in humorous interaction, learners may well benefit from working with puns and language play in the classroom in order to gain greater linguistic abilities and well-rounded communicative competence.

<p dir="ltr">This research explores the application of large language models (LLMs) to comprehension of puns. Leveraging the expansive capabilities of LLMs, this study delves into the domain of pun classification by examining it through the prism of two humor theories: the Computational Model of Humor and the Benign Violation theory, which is an extension of the N+V Theory. The computational model posits that for a phrase to qualify as a pun, it must possess both ambiguity and distinctiveness, characterized by a word that can be interpreted in two plausible ways, each interpretation being supported by at least one unique word. On the other hand, the Benign Violation theory posits that puns work by breaching one linguistic rule while conforming to another, thereby creating a "benign violation." By leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), this research endeavors to scrutinize a curated collection of English language puns. Our aim is to assess the validity and effectiveness of the use of these theoretical frameworks in accurately classifying puns. We undertake controlled experiments on the dataset, selectively removing a condition specific to one theory and then evaluating the puns based on the criteria of the other theory to see how well it classifies the altered inputs. This approach allows us to uncover deeper insights into the processes that facilitate the recognition of puns and to explore the practical implications of applying humor theories. The findings of our experiments, detailed in the subsequent sections, sheds light on how the alteration of specific conditions impacts the ability of the LLMs to accurately classify puns, according to each theory, where each component of the theory does not influence the result to the same extent, thereby contributing to our understanding of humor mechanics through the eyes of LLMs.</p>

Longtemps soupçonné d’hérésie, ’Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī, auteur du nord de la Syrie ayant vécu à cheval entre le IVe/Xe et le Ve/XIe siècles, fut disculpé à la fin du XIXe siècle par les précurseurs de la Nahd{a. Féru de la langue arabe, muni d’un style inaccessible au premier abord, la question qui se pose aujourd’hui est celle de savoir s’il faut se fier à ses contemporains ou à l’opinion d’hommes qui vécurent plusieurs siècles plus tard. Le présent travail a pour but de tenter de comprendre le langage de cet auteur et d’essayer de savoir pour quelles raisons un homme brillant par son intelligence et ses connaissances se borna à rédiger ce qui ressemble à une fable animalière anodine.Une analyse détaillée du texte révèle un ensemble de jeux de mots, d’allusions historiques, d’anecdotes et de citations coraniques qui tissent un deuxième texte en filigrane à travers l’épître, lequel s’avère être, d’une part, une critique véhémente contre toute religion, l’islam et son représentant le prophète Muh{ammad en particulier et, d’autre part, des conseils adressés au prince ‘Azīz al-Dawla, gouverneur indépendantiste d’Alep sous le règne des Fatimides, l’encourageant à prendre les armes et à propager les idées du maître. La véritable croyance de l’auteur reste cependant peu définie en dehors d’un refus de tout système religieux, désigné comme étant des mécanismes mis en place pour duper les gens simples d’esprit, et d’une foi inébranlable que la mort n’est autre qu’un sommeil sans suite.La technique d’écriture d’al-Ma‘arrī semble être un savant mélange de la technique bédouine de la tawriya dont l’usage primitif était d’échapper à la censure ou à la persécution et une inspiration de l’ouvrage pehlevi Kalīla wa-Dimna, un miroir des princes par excellence. / ’Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī who lived in the North of Syria between the 4th and the 5th century was suspected of heresy for a long time, and was finally cleared by the Nahd{a pioneers at the end of the 19th century. Extremely keen on the Arabic language and provided with an intricate style of writing, the question today is whether to believe his contemporaries or the opinion of men who lived centuries later. The present study tries to understand the author’s language and why such a brillant cultivated man wrote what looks like a trivial animal fable.A detailed analysis of the text reveals a succession of puns, hints to historical events, anecdotes and coranic quotes which grow into a second text interwoven throughout the « Epistle of a Horse and a Mule ». This latter appears to be, on the one hand, a vehement criticism towards religion, islam and Muh{ammad its prophet, and, on the other hand, advice given to Aleppo’s governor, ‘Azīz al-Dawla, who though allegied to the Fatimids, has a tendency toward independence, encouraging him to take arms and propagate the masters ideas. Nevertheless, the real faith of the author remains undetermined except for his refusal of all religious system viewed by him as mechanisms set to fool simple souls, and his belief that death is nothing but an endless sleep.Al-Ma‘arrī’s writing technique appears to be a refined combination of the bedouin’s technique tawriya which originally served as a means to escape censureship or even repression, and inspired by the pehlevi work of Kalila wa-Dimna, princes advice if ever there was.