магистрант Сарабекова Ж.М.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

Attempt at a definition of language-play

Language-play can be understood as a process, or a result, or both. In my study, the stress will be quite exclusively on the result aspect of the phenomenon, mostly because my material is of such a nature that it cannot provide me with any clues as to how the language-play contained in it may have been produced. That is true of both the SL and the TL versions. There is thus no need for me to try and define what constitutes language-play from a process perspective.

As a matter of fact, there are very few publications that deal explicitly with language-play rather than, say, humour or wordplay, and even the exceptions are of little help to me when it comes to formulating a definition of the concept that would coincide with my understanding of it. Kuczaj (1998:137), for example, focuses too much on the process when he claims that “[l]anguage play (and play in general) involves three basic types of behavior: modification, imitation (of others), and repetition (of the self)”. On a rather general level, that may be true for the ‘how’, but behaviour is not a notion that appears relevant for the identification of the ‘what’, i.e. the outcome in the form of linguistic material with certain properties.

For the same reason, i.e. it being a matter of process rather than product, I do not think it necessary to discuss the question as to how far language-play can actually be considered a form of play. The answers offered in the literature often hinge on the functions, or lack thereof, that one chooses to ascribe to the two concepts. Suffice it to say that both language-play and play in a more general and traditional sense are, in my opinion, ultimately purposeful activities, even though the effects may be quite different for the people involved in, or witnessing, them.

Grassegger’s admittedly rather vague definitions of language-play at least encompass the product as well as the process:

[.] language-play, by which is meant, in a very general manner, the playful use of the human communication tool. (Grassegger 1985:9)

Language-play, in its multifarious manifestations, makes use of the identity or similarity of the senses and sounds of words and syntactic constructions. (Grassegger 1985:9f)

[Let language-play be] the generic term for all forms of play with linguistic elements. (Grassegger 1985:18)

Still, the second quote may constitute too narrow a description of language- play, and thus not be perfectly consistent with the first and the third. After all, “play with linguistic elements” may involve more than “mak[ing] use of the identity or similarity of the senses and sounds of words and syntactic constructions”, which would fit better as a description of wordplay, were it not for the fact that the senses of the items being played with are usually anything but identical or similar.

Grassegger (1985:9) also stresses another aspect of language-play, not mentioned in the quotes above, namely creativity. Of course, any linguistic production requires some amount of creativity, but I think Grassegger is quite right in assuming that playing with language involves more creativity than, say, normal conversation. On the other hand, it may be difficult to make creativity a defining criterion for language-play precisely because creativity is a matter of degree rather than of ‘present’ versus ‘absent’.

Unfortunately, this final remark is quite true of other aspects of language- play, too. In particular, there simply is no obvious dividing line between segments of speech or written text that qualify as language-play and other segments that do not. For example, language-play has strong affinities with the domain of rhetoric, which, on the whole, I would like to ignore. Crystal (1998:148) addresses this problem, pointing out that too broad a notion of language-play would quickly lead one into the realm of stylistics:

It is of course possible to extend the notion of language play in that direction — and even to go beyond it, adopting broader and broader conceptions of language play, but if we do this, we shall end up defining the whole of language as language play. From that point of view, as soon as we open our mouths to speak or pick up our pens, we are ‘playing with language’, engaging in a ‘language game’ for which we need to follow the rules. (Crystal 1998:148)

In order to keep his topic relatively limited, Crystal prefers to focus on “the way we break the rules, and not the rules themselves” (1998:148). At the beginning of his book, he describes language-play as follows:

We play with language when we manipulate it as a source of enjoyment, either for ourselves or for the benefit of others. I mean ‘manipulate’ literally: we take some linguistic feature — such as a word, a phrase, a sentence, a part of a word, a group of sounds, a series of letters — and make it do things it does not normally do. We are, in effect, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun. (Crystal 1998:1)

Now, there are some parts in this passage that I would rather not want to incorporate into my own definition of language-play, while others seem more essential. In particular, I do not want to assume that there is only one function of language-play (enjoyment/fun), as Crystal seems to do. In fact, I do not consider changes in the emotional state of mind of the producer or the receiver decisive at all. In my opinion, it is part of the essence of language-play (the product) that it has or incorporates a certain effect, but this effect is first of all linguistic in nature and then cognitive. As I have indicated before, there is no reason why language-play should always have to be ‘fun’. Though Crystal goes out of his way to point out that language-play is not humour (1998:14-16), he does so on the assumption that humour is determined by laughter. I, too, have tried to argue that language-play and humour are not the same, and would now like to extend that claim to concepts such as enjoyment and fun, which may or may not be related to humour, but which are in any case too far removed from the level of language to be of use in a definition designed to remain close to that level.

I am also sceptical when it comes to an understanding of language-play as “bending and breaking the rules of the language”. Which rules are broken when we craft a pun, a rhyme, an alliteration? Are there any rules, even ‘unwritten’ ones, that would forbid us to do these things under any circumstance? Clearly, the answer is ‘no’, and even if we consider the Gricean maxims as rules, there would still be sequences of linguistic entities that constitute language-play without offending any maxims. In short, I think that an emphasis on rules and how they are bent and broken is misleading at best in this context.

What can be preserved of Crystal’s outline is the notion of the manipulation of language and the idea of making “it do things it does not normally do”. Again, these notions are not entirely unproblematic: it is, for example, fair to claim that many of the utterances we make, and certainly most, if not all, the sentences we write in a context such as this thesis, are original and unlikely ever to be produced again by someone else, with exactly the same choice of words, except perhaps by way of quotation. In one sense, therefore, we almost always manipulate linguistic features to make them do things they do not normally do. On the other hand, to put it like this may be taking too far this manner of reasoning, which, admittedly, I have used repeatedly in the present chapter as an arguing strategy. I would claim that there is, after all, and borderline cases notwithstanding, an essential difference between straightforward, ordinary language use and language-play. Toury seems to agree, considering his definition of the latter:

[.] a language play will be taken to consist in the application to an utterance of a definable type of rule, or set or rules, which is linguistic in nature — that is, accountable in linguistic terms — but not resorted to in ‘normal’, non-playful language uses. (Toury 1997:271; bold type omitted)

My own attempt, finally, at a definition of language-play is not all that different:

Language-play, contrary to normal, or non-playful, fragments of conversation or writing, is marked in the sense that the linguistic building blocks involved draw attention to themselves and their form, in addition to functioning as transmitters of content. In other words, language-play is present where the peculiarities of a linguistic system (or linguistic systems) have been exploited in such a way that an aural and/or visual (and by extension: cognitive) effect is achieved that would not be present, and perhaps consciously avoided, in language used with a focus on propositional content.

This definition is not perfect, and it certainly does not permit a mechanistic identification of language-play in a text. It is very doubtful whether any short and general definition like the one suggested here could actually do that without further qualifications. The qualifications that I can offer take the form of supplementary definitions, some of them quite detailed, of specific categories of language-play.

I consider this to be an acceptable compromise: on the one hand a very general definition that captures language-play in its entirety, but also runs the risk of being both too vague and too inclusive, on the other hand functional definitions facilitating the identification and categorization of specific instances of language-play in a particular corpus of linguistic material.

Literature:

1. Kuczaj, Stan A. 1998. Is an evolutionary theory of language play possible? Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 17:2. 135-154.

2. Grassegger, Hans. 1985. Sprachspiel und Ubersetyung: eine Studie anhand der Comic- Serie Asterix. Tubingen: Stauffenburg.

3. Crystal, David. 1998. Language Play. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

4. Toury, Gideon. 1997. What is it that renders a spoonerism (un)translatable? In: Delabastita, Dirk (ed). Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome & Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. 271-291.