Scarica Humor and Irony in Expatriate Travel Blogs: A Case Study of Rebecca's Views e più Dispense in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Humour and irony in an expatriate’s travel blog Travel blogs are becoming very common and so are the expatriates, who, after a holiday “under the Tuscan sun”, decide to move to Italy for good and live the “Italian Dream”. This paper summarizes the results of a case study which shows how humour and irony are commonly used in their online travel journals as preferred rhetorical strategies to carry out several social and rhetorical functions Rebecca’s Views: The corpus It is a collection of travel blog posts written between 2003 and 2006 by an American woman who has permanently moved from Chicago to a working farm in Umbria. It is a collection of 19 texts, mostly narrations or discussions of some controversial topics. Dann - Travel blogs: they are electronic journals written by travellers while they are still “on the road” and made freely available online. From a linguistic point of view, they are an expression of the tourist’s voice: they are written by travellers who are eager to share their experiences with their peers. Bloggers act as living testimonials to the quality of a destination or, in the case of expatriates, of a life experience. Travel blogs can however be seen as the contemporary heirs of a long tradition of travel literature that gives sound to a subjective voice, often witty and rich in humour. Register humour and irony in the corpus The most pervasive forms of humour in the corpus are irony and register humour, humour produced by the clash between the register used and the register that would be appropriate or expected in that situation. In order for the receiver to be able to understand and process humour, he must be able to recognise the intentions of the speaker and to understand the humorous attempt. The speaker will have to predict the interlocutor’s capability to access certain (cultural) assumptions. The effect usually relies on rhetorical devices, overstatement, and of course on contextual inappropriateness. The source of humour in “Rebecca’s Views” Rebecca’s main talent is that of “saying things funny” Graphological, phonological and morphological level The general tone of the blog is colloquial —> characteristics of written and spoken English merge Reproduction of voice quality and speech speed. Rebecca provides lively sketches of characters and of their way of speaking: The man [...] repeated his question veerrryyy slllowwwlllyy, "N---o, h----o----w m----u------- c----h i----- s t---h---e c---l---o---c----k i----n t----h---e w----i---n-d-o--- w???" My friend matched his speed, "I----t's 1---5---0,--0-- -0---0 l------i----r--e, a-----s m-----a-r-k-e---d." In the example the victim of the humour is a North American tourist who is trying to bargain for a clock that he has seen in a store. The price is clearly marked as the shop keeper has already explained in perfect English. The tourist repeats his question slowly as if the shop keeper could not understand English, and she provides the same answer as before, but matching the tourist’s speech speed. Exploitation of similarity of pronunciation = the phonological level is exploited in the reproduction of colloquialisms. The graphological level is involved through the use of capital letters to signal that the speaker is shouting. Capital letters are also used as irony markers to bring attention to certain concepts and make them relevant Syntactic level: Repetition and syntactic parallelism. Repetition is a significant strategy in humorous texts. The same structure is repeated incrementally and usually Use of syntactic structures typical of spoken English. Juxtaposition of long complex sentences and simple clauses. Semantics and pragmatics The semantic and pragmatic levels above all others are responsible for humorous effects in “Rebecca’s Views”. Canonical lexical antonymy = the good-bad antonymy is responsible for a witticism: ‘’The good thing is that you meet all these highly intelligent, motivated overachievers. The bad thing is that you meet all these intelligent, motivated overachievers’’ Ad-hoc construed lexical relations = items which would not be canonically considered to be in such relationship to each other are commonly created. Rebecca construes two types of WOMAN by listing typical features and opposing them Register humour. It is the prevalent type of humour found in the corpus. There are many passages in which trivial events or situations are described with words and expressions pertaining to a higher register. Creative paraphrases and definitions. Paraphrasing certain expressions in words better suited to a different register. An interesting example is the list of useful gestures for bargaining in Italy.
