A Cognitive-Pragmatic Study of Puns in English and Kurdish Advertisements

Abstract

   The current study aims to investigate the cognitive mechanisms in processing puns in English and Kurdish advertisement from the perspective of Relevance Theory as an approach to cognitive pragmatics. Puns involve ambiguity, incongruity, novelty and humor that serve advertisers to have an effective marketing tool. Advertisers leverage wordplay to engage their target audience and recall their brand name. The current study employs Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory to account for studying puns in English and Kurdish advertisements. It aims to analyze 10 samples, 5 from each language. The findings of this study reveal that linguistic structures and the background knowledge have great roles on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the comprehension of puns in the two languages. It also arrived at the point that in both English and Kurdish advertisements, RT is an appropriate approach for the analysis of puns. This research, further concludes that the cultural context of the two languages strongly affects the type and the humorous sense of puns.