Article

Name: Linguistic Peculiarities of Black Humour in “stishki-pirozhki”

Authors: G. I. Berestnev, I. Yu. Vertelova

Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University

Abstract: The article affirms that the language of black humour is closely related to the genre of the black humour texts. Of particular interest in this regard are the so-called “pirozhky poems” – complete doggerel quatrains of ineluctably unrhymed iambic tetrameters written all in lowercase, with no punctuation marks. Such poems reveal a certain affinity to folklore and reproduce the main attitudes of mass ideology. The article shows that the most striking feature of the “pirozhky poems” is the game phenomenon bringing about a risorial effect at all levels of the linguistic system. Episodic by nature, phonetic games are not pronounced in such doggerels, showing mainly irregular accentuations or syllable transformations due to the requirements of the meter. In this regard, various semantics games are of fundamental character. They are spectacularly and diversely manifested at the vocabulary level in the phenomena ensuring multiple interpretations of word meanings (primarily polysemy and homonymy), and also in terms of evaluation and style. Games on the grammatical level are most clearly manifested in the active use of personal names. In some cases, they perform a purely constructive function, in others, they are functionally predominant being associated with specific individuals. In terms of word formation, puns in pirozhky poems are hardly recurrent. They may occur when words that are not really related get involved in one verbal context, but in the word play they can be regarded as such; or they may be newly coined words that are near colloquial and have a certain potential. The syntactic character of pirozhky poems is even less distinct. The main feature of the pirozhky poems in terms of text organization is their pronounced intertextuality: they draw on works of fiction, funny stories, proverbs and sayings, songs, etc. Semantically, pirozhky poems are very diverse. They make ample use of metaphors, and there is also an interaction of the semantics of set phrases and their loose parallels. Resorting to absurdity and defying logic ensure specificity of semantic play in such poems. The typical features of “black” poetry are clearly manifested in its pragmatics. Their message is often based on a person’s knowledge of death and all that is associated with it. The study of the language typical of “black” pirozhky poems made it possible to reveal their common communicative attitude – an emphatically simplified attitude toward death and suffering, which is most clearly expressed in “sadistic” poems. All this allows us to conclude that at present the “black” theme is especially relevant in the Russian cultural environment.

Keywords: black humor, linguistic play, Russian, poetic text, phonetics, lexicon, semantics, grammar, pragmatics, phonetics, laughter

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