Exploring incongruity and humour in Linguistic Landscapes in Ghana

Abstract

In recent times, Linguistic Landscape (LL) research has been extended to cover several variables, domains, modes, and geo-political contexts. Arguably, humour remains understudied in LL research. This article, therefore, examines incongruities in LLs using a corpus of digital signs and incongruous inscriptions gathered across several mediums in urban Ghana. Drawing on the incongruity theory, we examined the levels of incongruities in the corpus. The study found that incongruities in public signs in urban Ghana manifest at the lexical, grammatical, semantic, and phonological levels. We conclude that the resolutions of these incongruities induce laughter and humour in the audience with the shared sociolinguistic knowledge, and humour intelligence. The findings have implications for the theory on humour and the research on LL.

Pharmacological Onomastics: The Case of Herbal Drugs in Ghana

“…The local is made up of the first language of the indigenous people, which is a mark of identity. All other languages are categorized under global while the glocal language label is restricted to only English, considering the language's deep connection to the identity politics of Ghanaians (Akoto et al, 2023).…”