Conceptual blending in English and Serbian question-and-answer jokes: cultural transfer issues

Abstract

This paper analyzes English and Serbian question-and-answer jokes using the cognitive linguistic theoretical framework of conceptual blending, which relies on mental spaces as cognitive packets of information used to interpret the world around us and within us. The analysis is used to illustrate how culture influences humour, specifically how the Anglo-American culture, the dominant and best-known foreign culture in Serbia, is used as a basis of jokes in English as well as Serbian. It is shown that the jokes in English can work on a non-English-speaking Serbian recipient culturally, but only if not impeded by linguistic obstacles, such as untranslatable puns. The selected Serbian jokes illustrate intercultural merging, as they use elements from both Anglophone and Serbian pop-cultures to create humour that is difficult to transfer back to Anglophone audiences, but now due to linguistic as well as cultural transfer issues. These issues revolve around humour translation, which is made difficult by linguistic aspects, cultural aspects, or both. Conceptual blending and the mental spaces involved provide a useful tool for adapting cultural/linguistic barriers to obtain more or less workable joke translations.

Frequency of anglicisms in verbal associations of English language students

“…На основу литературе о англицизмима који су присутни у српском језику (Filipović, 1986;Vasić i dr., 2001;Prćić, 2011;Kovačević-Filipović, 2011;Niketić, 2020;Дражић, 2022;Panić Kavgić, 2023;Mišić-Ilić i Lopičić, 2011;Prćić i dr., 2021;Оташевић и др., 2022), могу се наћи заједнички узроци уплива речи енглеског порекла у српски, у вези са којима су сви сложни, а то су: 1) језички контакти српског и енглеског; 2) прагматичка интерференција; 3) недостатак адекватног појма у српском и попуњавање појмовне празнине англицизмом; 4) изложеност енглеском језику од најранијег узраста (Кулић, 2019). Дефинисање англицизма није нимало једноставно, како на први поглед можда изгледа.…”

Conceptual blending on hotels’ websites advertisement

“…Conceptual Blending Theory, as explained by Fauconnier and Turner (Deyin, 2018;Ghachem, 2022;Mmadike et al, 2018;Niketić, 2019;Schorlemmer & Plaza, 2021), utilizes mental spaces to interpret conceptualized ideas. These mental spaces are constructed through thoughts and conversations and are then mapped and connected to other mental spaces, including generic spaces, input spaces, and blended spaces, to create emergent structures.…”

“…The generic space contains elements common to both input spaces, which can be general or abstract ideas linking the first input space to the second, facilitating cross-mapping between the spaces (Niketić, 2019;Zbikowski, 2018). Input spaces are analogous to the source and target domains in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which describe and are described by concepts, respectively.…”

“…Input spaces are analogous to the source and target domains in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which describe and are described by concepts, respectively. In Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT), based on CMT, input spaces contain different elements that are mediated through the generic space, demonstrating the relationship between ideas despite their differences (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008;Niketić, 2019;Saeed, 2016;Zbikowski, 2018).…”

“…Completion uses logic, background knowledge, and cultural context to add ideas that support the construction of the blend. Elaboration entails refining and expanding the emergent structure within the blend (Deyin, 2018;Ghachem, 2022;Mmadike et al, 2018;Niketić, 2019).…”