The Pragmatics of Nonsense

Towards a stylistics of Private Eyes Colemanballs*

Serman Prayogi (082084040)

*by Paul Simpson

 Colemanballs: a selection of linguistic blunders made by television and radio presenters in the Private Eye Magazine Colemanballs: David Coleman: a BBC sport comentator Balls=faux=errors

The unintentional humor that characterizes the Colemanballs genre has received little attention within stylistics (determining which features of written or spoken language characterize specific groups or contexts)

 Colemanballs discourse does not slot neatly into the categories of humour proposed by humorologists There are only two potentially applicable functions of humor out of five proposed by ZIv

1. The intellectual function based on absurdities, wordplay, and nonsense. The pleasure of humor resides in the temporary freedom from the strict rules and rationality 2. The aggressive function directed towards as victim who is made of fun and ridiculed.

 A problem which pervades any systematic study of funny language, the tokens selected from Colemanballs corpus should certainly provide some amusement for the reader of this Essay.

Psycholinguistic Evidence

 The potential for humor in speech error can be noticed: That speech errors so often produce unintended but meaningful utterances makes them strong candidates for humor. (Fromkin 1971:39)

 Three patterns predominate: 1. Anticipations 2. Perseverances 3. Methatheses

involving

segmental

substitution

Maxims and Implicature

Grice notes that conversation normally exhibit some degree of coherence and continuity, which suggests that speakers are obeying some general principle of cooperation.

Speakers should make their conversational contributions such as are required by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk in which they are engaged
The pragmatics analysis of selected tokens from the Colemanballs corpus is related with several maxims.

Four sets of highly normative conversational maxims: 1. Maxims of Quantity: 2. Maxims of Quality 3. Maxims of Relation 4. Maxims of Manner

Quantity Implicatures

Despite the fact that, within the terms of Gricean model, the token is paradigmatic of a flout on the Maxim of Quantity, it still find their way into Colemanballs Hurricane Higgins can either win or lose this final match tomorrow (Archie McPherson)

Alderman knows that he is either going to get a wicket or he isnt (Steve Brenkley)

The humorous potential of the tokens above is dependant on the blockage of intended implicatures.
A speaker who selects a particular term from a scale will implicate that any leftwards term does not obtain. Thus in uttering:

John scored eight points

A speaker conversationally implicates that John did not score nine points or ten points and so on. It is important to stress that such scalar implicatures are pragmatic inferences not logical consequences.

Quality Implicatures

Broadly speaking, speakers flout the Maxim of Quality by saying something which is manifestly false in context.
Such quality implicatures above will incorporate all sorts of traditional rhetoric devices, such as irony, metaphor, meiosis, and Hyperbole.

Extending the Analysis

One aspect of the Colemanballs discourse not touched upon so far concerns the type of metalinguistic activity in which presenters are engaged. Such metalinguistic activity takes the form of either discourse deixis or modality.

Modality constitutes the second important metadiscoursal function. Like discourse deictic, modal expressions are nonpropositional in that they lie outside the major information carrying components of the utterances.

Concluding Remarks

The foregoing stylistics will have gone some way towards explaining how Colemanballs type humour is developed. The humorous potential of tokens does not reside in phonological, morphological, or syntactic structure, nor is it a property of lexical or sentence semantics. One route to comparative linguistic safety would be available to them if they chose to adhere faithfully to the four sets of conversational maxims.