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"English language Dictionaries Humor."
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Subtitling Saudi Arabic slang into English: the case of “The Book of the Sun” on Netflix
The aim of this study is to analyze Saudi Arabic slang expressions and examine their subtitling into English. The data utilized in this research consists of slang terms identified in the film titled “The Book of the Sun”, available on the streaming platform Netflix, along with their corresponding English translations. This study primarily examines three key dimensions of slang expressions: originality, conciseness, and humor. It also explores the subtitling strategies used to render these slangs and the effectiveness of such strategies. The study’s findings indicate that all identified slangs (100%) are created by assigning new meanings to pre-existing established words in a creative way. Some of them are made concise by mapping them into faʕʕala verb template. Additionally, the subtitler has employed specific strategies to convey the intended meaning of these slangs, namely generalization, paraphrase, official equivalent, direct translation, and cultural substitution. However, the study posits that the strategies employed are ineffective in conveying the intended meaning of slang expressions.
Journal Article
Coping strategies in oral academic presentations of international undergraduate students in a Philippine university: a small-case study
Higher education students are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of being successful in oral academic presentations (OAP) in their academic endeavors. For English as a second language students in English-medium institutions, it also provides them with opportunities for language socialization. However, succeeding in the delivery of an OAP comes with various challenges emerging from linguistic and psychological factors. This small-case study explores OAPs as an oral academic socialization activity by documenting the strategies that 13 international undergraduate students in a large private Philippine university use to cope with the difficulties facing them in preparing and presenting an OAP. Using language socialization as the theoretical framework and semi-structured interviews to gather data, it identifies and explains eight personal strategies (six still employed and two no longer used) and discusses various factors that play a vital role in applying these strategies. The three most commonly used strategies are adopted to ensure a successful and acceptable OAP, typically a graded task. The two least frequently used ones are yet to be employed successfully. In applying these strategies, students not only perform the required academic task but are also engaged in different levels and frequencies of language socialization before and during the delivery of an OAP. Pedagogical implications in the use of OAPs as an academic task for language socialization in higher education are also discussed.
Journal Article
An Analysis of Verbal Humor in 2 Broke Girls from the Perspective of Conversational Implicature
Humor can be seen everywhere in social communication, and it often appears in conversation in the form of verbal humor. In western culture, humor, regarded as a sort of linguistic art, is a window to understand western culture. Thus, humor comprehension has important practical significance for English learners to better understand, master and use English. This study, based on theories of Conversational Implicature, attempts to analyze the production of verbal humor from the perspective of Cooperative Principle, and an abundance of humorous conversations from the sitcom, 2 Broke Girls, are collected as analytical material as well, aiming to cultivate English learners’ comprehensive ability of American humorous utterances and to improve their intercultural communication competence.
Journal Article
Literally: How to Speak like an Absolute Knave
A family of Shakespearean characters I call “the perverse literalists” takes the figurative language of their interlocutors in the most literal sense. While they make us laugh, these characters' perversely literal interpretations also highlight the physical and experiential grounds of common figures of speech and prod their interlocutors and the reader into a deeper understanding of the conditions of embodiment. his inventive use of the literal is a trope in its own right, one that has already been useful to cognitive linguists, phenomenologists, and new materialists. Metaphors we consider dead are, as others have suggested, merely sleeping, and the act of waking them up can be not merely funny but profoundly insightful. We should reexamine the widespread aversion to the misuse of literally and think instead about what it can tell us about the physicality of such abstract experiences as love and luck, causality and cognition.
Journal Article
Multiple Labels Marking Connotative Values of Idioms in the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English
This contribution is aimed at studying multiple labelling in the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English (OIDLE2). We sought to establish whether labels belonging to one and the same category combine with one another or whether multiple labelling consists of labels from different categories of labels, the latter providing different types of information. The database used for the analysis was compiled by searching manually through the dictionary and keying in all the idioms with multiple labelling into our database. Altogether, 392 idioms or their senses with two or more labels were found in OIDLE2. The findings of the study are: labels expressing different types of diasystematic information are included; the three most frequent labels appearing in combination with other labels are informal, humorous and old-fashioned; the combination of four labels is used only once, ten idioms were identified with three labels, while the majority of label combinations consist of two labels. The significance of the findings lies in the issues related to multiple labels, combinations of labels expressing different types of diasystematic information and other issues related to labelling in general. The inclusion of diasystematic information largely depends on the type of dictionary and its intended users. This is especially true of dictionaries intended for non-native speakers of a language, where one of the main functions is to promote the active use of a foreign language, and where every single piece of information included in the dictionary counts.
Journal Article
The Ghost in the Machine: Emotion and Mind–Body Union in Hamlet and Descartes
For centuries physicians and theorists \"continued to work on the assumption that... emotions were corporeal,\" a position that has become commonplace in histories of the passions.10 On the humoral model, distempers of both mind and body arise as a consequence of dyskrasia, when the qualities of any one humor overpower the temperate warmth and moistness requisite for physical and mental health. [...]for this more limited meaning, Descartes tells us he prefers the (French) word emotion, explaining that it is even better to call them \"emotions\" of the soul, not only because this term may be applied to all the changes which occur in the soul... but more particularly because, of all the kinds of thought which the soul may have, there are none that agitate and disturb it so strongly as the passions.31 By the middle of the seventeenth century, Descartes's preferred term for the passions has no English equivalent in common use. [...]only recently, the Oxford English Dictionary listed 1660 for the earliest occurrence of emotion as an alternative for passion. [...]emotion is used interchangeably with passion at least as early as 1602, although it seems somewhat rare before the late 1640s and beyond.32 In the anonymous translation of Descartes's Passions printed at London in 1650, a preference for the English term emotion was voiced perhaps for the first time, justified by an appeal to the mechanical physiology. According to Keith Thomas, in fact, the reformist denial of Purgatory did little to quell belief in ghosts.'1 Instead, as skeptic Reginald Scot complained in 1584, \"[W]e think souls and spirits may come out of heaven or hell.
Journal Article
A Study of the Humor Aspect of English Puns: Views from the Relevance Theory
A distinctive rhetorical device, puns are wittily applied in advertisements, daily conversations, riddles, etc. Formed by the combination in certain contexts with polysemic or homophonic words, puns naturally lead to more than one interpretation in an actual communication. Puns have many different functions in utterances as well. In this paper Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory is used to analyze how the humor effects of puns are constructed. In the process of comprehending a pun, the audience decodes the communicator's ostensive utterance in its a context. If the context contradicts the usual interpretation, the audience rebuilds a new assumption with their encyclopedic knowledge, logical and lexical information, and deduces the real implication of the utterance--and appreciates the great humor effects of English puns. Index Terms--English puns, Relevance Theory, contextual effect, humor effect
Journal Article