No abstract

No abstract

This paper explores sort humor ‘black humor’, a key concept in Danish conversational humor. Sort forms part of a larger class of Danish synesthetic humor metaphors that includes other categories such as tør ‘dry’, syg ‘sick’, and fed ‘fat’. Taking an ethnopragmatic perspective on humor discourse, it is argued that such constructs function as a local catalogue for socially recognized laughing practices. The aim of the paper is to provide a semantic explication for sort humor and explore the discursive practices associated with the concept. From a comparative perspective, it is demonstrated that the Danish conceptualization of “blackness” differs from that of l’humour noir, a category of French surrealism, and English black humor with its off-limit topics such as death and handicap. In Danish discourse, sort humor has come to stand for a practice of collaborative jocular non-sense making. It is further argued that the main function of sort humor is to establish or enhance a feeling of “groupy togetherness”.

There are footprints of pigs all over the Danish language. Pig-based verbs, nouns and adjectives abound, and the pragmatics of Danish, including its repertoire of abusives, is heavily reliant on porcine phraseology. Despite the highly urbanized nature of the contemporary Danish speech community, semantic structures from Denmark's peasantfarmer past appear to have survived and taken on a new significance in today's society. Unlike everyday English, which mainly distinguishes pig from pork, everyday Danish embodies an important semantic distinction between grise, which roughly speaking translates as 'nice pigs', vis-à-vis svin, which, very roughly, translates as 'nasty pigs'. Focusing on the pragmatics of svin-based language, this paper demonstrates how this concept is utilized in Danish interaction and social cognition. The paper explores systematically the culture-specific porcine themes in Danish evaluational expressions, speech acts and interpersonal relations. The paper demonstrates that 'pigs in language' is far from a trivial topic and argues that cultural elaboration of pig-words and the culture-specific 'meaning of pigs' in Danish not only sheds light on the diverse linguistic construals of 'animal concepts' in the world's languages: it also calls for a culturalsemantic approach to the study of social cognition.

No abstract