Humour is part of human communication and can serve as an effective means for making contact, finding a way out of an embarrassing situation, or mitigating different political and social tensions. However, not all humans are born capable of generating and processing humour and it remains an open question whether it is possible to learn and develop this ability. Therefore, a sense of humour, but not an *ability of humour, would be a frequent collocation in many languages. Cognitive linguists claim that collocations are not accidental as combinability patterns point to certain conceptualisation processes in the expression of meaning. The cognitive linguistic viewpoint that humour is based on a mismatch, or incongruity, between ideas, otherwise referred to as frame shifting, is adopted as a prerequisite for producing humour in this paper.The focus of this paper is the expression of verbal humour dealing with the introduction of the euro in Lithuania in 2015. Verbal humour is created by employing different linguistic resources: sounds, spelling, word building models, homonymy and polysemy, word combinations and other syntactic structures and larger chunks of texts or discourse. The investigation is based on the main theories of humour: the Semantic Script Theory and the Superiority Theory developed by Attardo (1994) and Raskin (1985). The empirical material consists of 89 cases of verbal humour found in posts and comments in personal profiles and pages on Facebook and in reader comments following different articles in popular news portals written from September 2014 to February 2015. The paper attempts to describe linguistic means contributing to the construction of humour as well as to identify the shifts between frames involved in generating the humorous effect. The results of the investigation suggest that most humorous comments bear content-related political implications, shifting between the frames of the loss of national currency perceived either as the loss of stability or as the loss of national identity and the frame of positive expectations due to the greater integration into the EU. The techniques used to construct humour include wordplay based on sound combinations, similar spelling, non-standard spelling, and code-switching involving English and Russian. An especially productive technique was the construction of existing or non-existing words by code-mixing and the use of metaphor and metonymy. Larger chunks of text also employ intertextuality, parody, switching between registers and different types of echoing.

In

This paper aims to examine the meeting points between phraseology and humor research, focusing on the role and the functions of fixed phrases in humor discourse. The examples to illustrate certain aspects of usage of fixed phrases for joke purposes are taken mainly from social media such as Facebook and Twitter and include jokes in English, German, Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish. In the course of the investigation, a distinction ought to be made between set phrases (idioms in the narrower sense of the term, proverbs, catch phrases etc.) and fixed phrases in general. Set phrases (phrasemes) have an “added value” regarding their meaning – be it a figurative element, be it ready-made reasoning or behavioral models in short form in the case of adages. In humor discourse idioms – and proverbs – are used mainly for wordplay, in which both the literal and the idiomatic meaning are activated. The wordplay can happen also in verse form. Adages can be transformed or twisted resulting in new parodistic or funny sayings. Fixed phrases outside of the phraseology can be separated into two groups: phrases typical for a particular discourse type and joke frame related phrases. The former, as means to evoke a certain frame, are used in parodistic jokes (e.g., the phrase ladies if he evokes the dating tips frame). The latter constitute a distinct class of fixed phrases which can be found only in the humor discourse: these phrases act as joke formulae und provide a basis for bigger or smaller joke categories. Certain phrases in this group, such as checks notes or nothing like deserve a mention as irony markers with a distinctive evaluative character. The shared feature of all these idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrases is that they are well-known, re-occur in the language and, in that respect, can considered belonging to the sphere of interests of phraseology. Regarding the main functions of fixed phrases in the humor discourse, they can contribute to the social play, provide the cues to switch to a nonserious humor mindset or express evaluation – from mild mockery to aggressive ridicule.

In letzter Zeit ist die Zahl der Untersuchungen von phraseologischen Erscheinungen unter Berücksichtigung ihrer kulturellen Eingebundenheit rasant gestiegen 1 , es steht außer Frage, dass beim interlingualen Vergleich kulturelle und sprachliche Fakten eng verknüpft sind (Földes 1996, 179). Der vorliegende Beitrag ist auch ohne interkulturellen Vergleich kaum denkbar. Die Aktualität des Themas ist durch praxisbezogene Probleme der kontrastiven Phraseologie bedingt, u. z. durch die Äquivalenzbeziehungen der deutschen und der litauischen Phraseologismen. Obwohl infolge der wechselseitigen Durchdringung der Massenmedien in Europa die Internationalisierung der phraseologischen Systeme stets zunimmt (Mokienko 1998, 540), ist der Aspekt der kulturellen Spezifik immer noch von Interesse. Phraseologismen, die ihren Ursprung in der Bibel, den mythologischen Überlie-ferungen der Antike, in der Weltliteratur haben, bilden nur einen Teil des phraseologischen Lexikons, ebenfalls wie solche, die auf übereinstimmenden Beobachtungen, Erfahrungen, auf der gleichen Lebens-, Assoziations-und Denkweise fußen (Földes 1996, 98

Šiame straipsnyje, remiantis pasaulio modelio teorija, lyginamas ŠARKOS simbolis vokiečių ir lietuvių frazeologijoje. Pasaulio modelis – tai semiotizuotas konstruktas, atspindintis tam tikros kalbinės ir kultūrinės bendruomenės žvilgsnį į pasaulį bei vertybinę orientaciją. Svarbų vaidmenį pasaulio modelyje atlieka simboliai – ženklai, kurių konotacinės reikšmės tampa svarbesnės nei denotacinės ir kurie padeda tos bendruomenės nariams orientuotis socialinėje ir kultūrinėje aplinkoje. Pasitelkus ŠARKOS simbolį, bandoma gretinti jo reikšmes dviejų bendrai Europos erdvei priklausančių tautų pasaulio modeliuose, drauge ieškant sąlyčio ir skirties taškų tarp kultūros (liaudies tikėjimų, tautosakos, mitologijos, religijos) ir kalbos. Atliktas tyrimas leidžia teigti, kad ŠARKOS vaizdinys vokiečių ir lietuvių tautose turi daugiau panašumų nei skirtumų, ką būtų greičiausiai galima paaiškinti ir bendra indoeuropietiška praeitimi, ir kultūriniais mainais. Taipogi reikėtų paminėti abipusę kultūrinių ir kalbinių vaizdinių įtaką priskiriant simboliui – šiuo atveju ŠARKAI – tam tikras reikšmes.