Pragmalingvistički pristup analizi humorističnog sadržaja o COVID-19 pandemiji

Abstract

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many unusual and unexpected situations in all areas of life, including language, to which almost every Croatian citizen has been exposed. This social paradigm shift exemplifies the fact that context changes the meaning of a language utterance. In other words, ordinary semantics aside, new semantic meanings have come up which haven’t existed before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. The context by which we decipher the meaning is the key for the pragma-linguistic content analysis explored in this paper. Its purpose is to research the types of conversational maxims which are broken in humoristic utterances. The content consists of examples collected in March 2021 from a pool of interpersonal and group communication sources. Using humor in language as a narrative shines a light on tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, implication etc. Without them, we would lose a chance to broaden our horizons, i.e. to explore Iva Borić, Jelena Hadžić: PRAGMALINGVISTIČKI PRISTUP ANALIZI HUMORISTIČNOG SADRŽAJA O COVID-19 PANDEMIJI Media, Culture and Public Relations, 12, 2021, 1 104 ISSN 1333-6371 the area between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Seeing as most humor innately breaks some maxims, the possible interpretations of the analysed utterances illustrate how context and maxim-breaking as basic principles of rational talk bring about new meanings and comic effect (or an additional comical trigger, different from the existing one, in a new context).