Cultural Aspects of Language

Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

CULTURAL ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE

Understanding Jokes

Term Paper - Language in Use- SS 2013/14

Composed by:

Vanessa Villefort

1011215

Vanessa.Villefort@edu.uni-graz.at

Teacher: Penz, Hermine, Ao.Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil.

Graz, July 2014

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 2

2 Culture and language .............................................................................................................. 3

2.1 Defining culture ............................................................................................................................. 3

2.2 Cultural Aspects of Language .................................................................................................... 3

2.2.1 Idiomatical expressions ....................................................................................................................... 4

2.2.2 Word plays ................................................................................................................................................. 4

3 Culture and jokes ..................................................................................................................... 6

3.1 Defining Jokes ................................................................................................................................ 6

3.2 Cultural aspects of jokes ............................................................................................................. 6

4 Analysis of jokes ....................................................................................................................... 8

4.1 Scenes-and-frames theory ......................................................................................................... 8

4.2 Analysis............................................................................................................................................. 9

5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 11

6 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 12

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1 Introduction

"A day without laughter is a wasted day", a famous quotation attributed to Chaplin, expresses the importance of humor in today's societies. However, although jokes are part of our everyday language, it cannot be taken for granted that a joke is always understood correctly. A possible reason for the failure of conveying humor can be supposedly seen in a lack of cultural understanding. Therefore this paper aims to illustrate the cultural aspect of language with special emphasis on the comprehension of jokes. In this context the close affiliation between language and culture should be shown and proved that the comprehension of jokes depends also on the listeners' cultural background knowledge.

First of all, the term culture will be defined and a connection between culture and language will be drawn. Subsequently the object of investigation will be explained and defined. Furthermore cultural aspects of jokes will be illustrated. After the readers have been provided with the basis needed for a proper understanding of this paper some sample jokes will be analyzed. The analysis will be based on the scenes-and-frames theory of Charles Fillmore and attempts to prove the significance...