The formal composition of puns in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost: a corpus-based study.(LINGUISTICS)(Table)

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Adam Mickiewicz University

ABSTRACT

The present paper is a corpus-based study seeking to demonstrate, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the formal composition of puns in one of Shakespeare's early festive comedies, i.e. Love's labour's lost (c1593/4). Pun is defined here after Delabastita (1993: 57) as a phenomenon depending for its existence on the juxtaposition of (at least two) similar/identical forms and (at least two) dissimilar meanings, where, broadly speaking, the subtler the formal contrast and the sharper the semantic one, the finer the punning effect. The reason behind selecting this particular play for the examination has been the initial assumption that, rich in verbal experiments of all sorts, it might prove a fertile source of punning forms which, indeed, run altogether to 423 instances. The qualitative study is essentially two-partite and, initially, sets out to investigate linguistic phenomena which lay down the framework of formal relationships in a pun (and are, thus, in a mutually exclusive way, obligatory for its creation), namely homonymy, homophony and paronymy. Next, punning forms are grouped into interlingual puns, proper name puns as well as idiom- and compound-based puns. On top of that, a quantitative analysis is carried out which demonstrates (in a tabular and graphic form) the overall numerical and percentage distribution of all categories of puns established in the present research study.

0. Preliminary remarks

There is no need to argue a case for Shakespeare's lavish preoccupation with verbal wit which ranks high among the most recurrent markers of his idiosyncratic style, and is perhaps as much a response to the 16th-century vogues as a reflection of his deep-seated propensity for punning. As such, it has come in for considerable criticism, chiefly literary and editorial, where two contradictory approaches to the phenomenon can be observed, namely enthusiasm on the one hand and reluctance on the other. Irrespective of the approach, quantitative analyses of all sorts agreeably present Shakespeare as an incorrigible punster. They may each yield slightly different figures but the score is invariably high, with the total of three thousand puns in the whole canon and the average of seventy-eight apiece, Love's labour's lost (LLL), the play of sole concern in the present study, being most generously studded with them.

Unlike the literary criticism, offering a remarkable insight into the character and function of punning practices in many authors (with Shakespeare holding the lead), linguistically-oriented scholarship emerges comparatively fragmentary, leaving puns a largely unexplored domain. Although reasons for this can be multiplied many times over, the heaviest charge against the phenomenon and the most efficient deterrent from it relates principally to lack of both terminological and classificatory rigour in critical literature.

Since it is not germane to the present discussion to explain reasons for terminological chaos which puns create, those of prime importance will only be mentioned in passing. Firstly, considered either a non-complex linguistic formation or a phenomenon which, entailing ambiguity, upsets neat regularity in language, pun has not received enough critical attention and, accordingly, a coherent account of the mechanisms underlying it is sorely lacking. Secondly, puns have been approached from a couple of diverse angles in multiple academic disciplines, linguistic and other (e.g. semantics, psycho- and socio-linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, stylistics), each tackling a different aspect of puns and submitting its own terminological apparatus. Thirdly, the phenomenon has received the attention of scholars employing nomenclature from various languages (alongside English, principally German and French) which, barely congruent intralingually, tends to soak through language borders. (1) Fourthly, as a result of the Empsonian tradition nascent in the thirties, ambiguity, the cornerstone of (nearly all sorts of) puns (see footnote 8 (ii) above) has been loosely defined as an umbrella term for any uncertainty permitting alternative meanings/interpretations of the same piece of language, which has obliterated some of the phenomenon's niceties. Finally, all too frequently puns have been regarded roughly equivalent to wordplay, which, if not wholly fallacious, is somewhat imprecise on the recognition of the fact that the latter is a more capacious cover term for phenomena not subsumable under pun. (2)

1. Pun: The definition and selected facts about the semantic structure

However diverse the dictionary entries for a pun may be, they all agree that (i) the phenomenon depends for its existence on the juxtaposition of (at least two) similar/identical forms and (at least two) dissimilar meanings, and (ii) broadly speaking, the subtler the formal contrast and the sharper the semantic one, the finer the punning effect. (3) While, as the focal issue of the present paper, the formal composition of puns will be handled in detail in section 3, it should be mentioned at this point that, concerned with the intersection of orthography and pronunciation, it rests on linguistic mechanisms encompassing homonymy, homophony, homography and paronymy. In turn, the semantic composition, understood as a union of primary (surface-level) and secondary/tertiary/quaternary, etc. (underlying) meanings (hereafter referred to as s(ense)1 and s(ense)2, respectively) which, to permit a pun, need to be sufficiently distinct, calls for further commentary. Given that homophonic, homographic and paronymic types of puns emerge semantically relatively unproblematic, (4) the following brief discussion will be apposite to the homonymic variety of pun alone.

A fundamental assumption made right at the outset should be that the sole kind of meaning able to engender contrast needed for the desired punning effect is conceptual (alternatively termed "denotative", "cognitive" or "logical"). Referring to a regular (non-punning) performance Leech (1974) is positive that conceptual meaning "can be shown to be integral to the essential functioning of language in a way that other types of meaning (5) are not (which is not to say that conceptual meaning is the most important element of every act of linguistic communication) ... [because] it has a complex and sophisticated organization of a kind which may be compared with, and cross-related to, similar organization on the syntactic and phonological levels of language" (Leech 1974: 9). In a playful use of language conceptual meaning will, likewise, be claimed primary to other types of meaning, notably connotative and affective, themselves capable only of augmenting the overall import of words as defined by conceptual meaning.

Leech's (1974) model of a multi-layered semantic structure, where ultimately also a terminological differentiation is made between the conceptual meaning, labelled "sense", and the remaining types of meaning, subsumed all under a collective name "communicative value", bears some resemblances to Cruse's (1995: 33-49) scrupulous delimitation between genuine meanings, termed likewise "senses", and fake ones,...

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